What does a 2 meg up and down broadband connection mean?

Question

How good is this if being used for a business?

Answer 1

It's quite good, at least by standards in the USA, where we typically get 768k for DSL and 1.5meg for cable.

Upstream is how fast you can send data to the Internet provider- in most cases this doesn't need to be that fast, since the amount of data you send is is minimal compared to what you receive. For example, you type "www.yahoo.com" and hit enter- those 13 characters are sent upstream, and coming back downstream, you receive the content from Yahoo's main page.

Upstream is important if you're running a server that other users will be connecting to, sending out large files via e-mail, or running P2P programs. It limits how quickly you can send outbound data.

Downstream is how fast you can receive data, download files etc.

So 2 meg "up & down" means you have the same speed going in both directions. It's very common for Internet providers to offer less expensive packages with down speeds being much greater than up, such as 1.5mb down/384k up.

Answer 2

It depends how big of a business it is and/or what the connection will be used for. It means that you have 2 megabit download speed and 2 megabit upload speed.