What is broadband upload speed?

Broadband upload speed is the speed at which data (e.g. your fab new holiday pics) are uploaded to the internet (e.g. when you load your holiday pics onto a website).

Upload speeds are much, much slower than download speeds. The reason for this is that people generally do far more downloading (e.g. viewing web pages) than uploading, so download speed is more critical and is given priority.

For those techies out there, ADSL (i.e. connecting to broadband down your telephone line) stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. It is asymmetric and faster in one direction than the other.

Upload speeds obviously become more important to someone who is going to be doing large amounts of uploading, e.g. someone who works from home and wants to exchange files with a remote network.

Unfortunately, most upload speeds are still a measly 256Kb/second - even worse, many internet service providers (ISPs) don't even bother to specify their upload speed

What's a kilobit anyway?

There are a thousand bits in a kilobit, and a thousand kilobits in a megabit.

People often get confused between kilobits (Kb) and kilobytes (KB). In summary, there are 8 bits in a byte, so, if your upload speed is 256 kilobits per second, then that's the same as 32 kilobytes per second.

Download speeds are -thankfully - much, much quicker!