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Working at home is becoming more popular as the Internet applications become better at allowing people to work together across greater distances. There are a variety of different kinds of online collaboration software that range from simple chatting, VoIP, and document exchange applications available for free through companies like Google, to specialized forms of software that allow relatively large groups of people to meet and work on a project all at once, to virtual worlds like Second Life that allow people to interact in a number of different ways that include actually getting work done.
While it should be obvious that you need a high speed Internet connection in order to work at home in all of these different ways, it’s not always obvious that some types of high speed Internet connections work better than others for interacting online and getting things accomplished with other people in real time. In order to get an idea of how to be effective with working online over a high speed Internet connection, it’s important to understand the types of Internet connections available.
The first thing that needs to be addressed is dial up services that claim to be able to accelerate download speeds. These may be able to make Internet access faster, but they typically do so by decreasing the resolution of pictures that are downloaded. This does nothing to speed up the transfer of the data needed for online collaboration and therefore won’t apply to making online collaboration work.
Among the real kinds of high speed Internet connections that you’ll have to choose among are broad band digital cable, DSL, and satellite Internet. Broad band digital cable high speed Internet connections are the best choice by far for working at home and over the Internet. They provide greater bandwidth than the others. In fact, with standard download speeds of 8 mbps, you could have several kinds of collaboration software running at the same time or have other members of your household online while your working without running into bandwidth limitation problems.
DSL is another option for working online, but it doesn’t provide as much bandwidth, so it’s not as good of a choice. DSL service rarely delivers more than 2 mbps at one time, which severely limits the number of applications that can be run or people that can access the Internet at the same time, making it less than ideal for a small, home based business. Moreover, many DSL connections don’t deliver the minimum bandwidth necessary for many kinds of collaboration software. In a lot of cases, distance and poor wiring decrease the available bandwidth down to speeds as low as 256 kbps, which is below the minimum bandwidth needed for applications like Second Life and really cutting it close with others as well.
Satellite Internet is a really poor choice. It’s extremely expensive and it has similar kinds of limitations on its bandwidth to DSL. The real sticking point of this kind of Internet delivery technology is that it has a time lag built into it by the distance that data has to travel to and from the satellites. Since signals have to travel over eighty thousand miles total (back and forth two times) at the speed of light, the resulting time lag is likely to disrupt any kind of Internet application that functions in real time.
All of this makes broad band digital cable high speed Internet the best choice for working at home.
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