Poll: Do you have faster Internet at home or at the office?
A decade ago, nearly all of us had much faster Internet access at the office than at home. The connection at work was typically a T1, T3, or Frame Relay connection that dwarfed the dial-up (or even some of the early DSL and Cable) connections that were available to home users.
However, that dynamic is rapidly changing. Corporate Internet access still has exorbitant prices because the telecom providers have to guarantee a basic level of service and bandwidth. Meanwhile, telecoms continue to upgrade the maximum speeds available to home users because they do not have to guarantee basic bandwidth speeds and most home users only utilize the connection for a few hours a day.
As a result, some home users can now get up to 50 Mpbs downstream bandwidth, which is faster than the fastest T3 (45 Mbps) that corporations could get a decade ago (and those were often shared by hundreds of users at a time).
So, it's not uncommon for today's workers to have faster Internet access (and better bandwidth) at home than at the office. This dynamic is having a impact on work patterns, as more and more professionals are now capable of working from home.
We'd like to know if you have a faster Internet connection at work or at home, judging by your perception of how fast Web pages load as well as the raw download speeds.
If you're not sure about the raw speeds, you can use these two speed tests to measure: