Like many industries, the Telecommunications industry has many terms which are difficult to understand. Below are some of the common ones explained.

Bandwidth: The amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time

Contention:  The contention ratio is the ratio of the potential maximum demand to the actual bandwidth of the service. The higher the contention ratio, the greater the number of users that may be trying to use the actual bandwidth at any one time and, therefore, the lower the effective bandwidth offered, especially at peak times. With a contention ratio of under 50 to 1, Our Community Broadband uses one of the lowest contention rates in the industry – meaning you are likely to achieve your theoretical speeds and are less likely to suffer reduced speeds during peak periods.

Download – This is the process of retrieving a copy of information from your own or a remote computer.

12 / 1 Mbps: This is the theoretical speed at which you download from the internet (12 Megabits per second), and the theoretical speed at which you upload to the internet (1 Megabit per second)

25 / 5 Mbps: This is the theoretical speed at which you download from the internet (25 Megabits per second), and the theoretical speed at which you upload to the internet (5 Megabit per second)

Fixed Wireless Broadband: An antenna is mounted on a property, and then pointed towards and tuned to a nearby distribution point to establish a direct secure connection.

Gigabyte (GB) – This is a unit of storage capacity. There are 1,024 megabytes in one GB

Megabyte (MB) – This is a unit of storage capacity, there are 1024 kilobytes in a MB.

Router – This is a piece of hardware that allows 2 networks to be connected so that data can be transferred between them.

Streaming – This is when you watch or listen to a multimedia file as it’s downloading, it means you don’t have to fully download and save the file before hand.

Upload – This is the process of transferring data from your computer hard drive to a remote location.