The Internet provides a great number of opportunities for entertainment, connecting with friends and business associates, getting an education, tracking investments, and finding great deals while shopping. With all of these advantages, you probably want to have a high speed Internet connection in your home if you don’t have one there already. While upgrading from dial up is a good thing to do, you’re probably kind of confused by the options that you have available to you. This is understandable with all of the different technologies and the companies that are offering them that you have to choose from.

If you’re fortunate enough to have access to cable TV from a company like Comcast, then you’re also probably fortunate enough to be able to get an Internet connection that’s delivered over that same broad band digital cable technology. Granted that if you have access to cable Internet, then you also probably have access to DSL, satellite, and possibly some kind of municipal WiFi Internet as well, but there are still a lot of reasons to consider broad band cable.

The first advantage that broad band cable from a company like Comcast has over other forms of broad band Internet technology is speed. With the possible exception of muni WiFi, Comcast’s broad band cable high speed Internet has the largest bandwidths with download speeds that vary from six to twelve megabytes per second, depending on the level of service that’s been subscribed to and whether or not the special Power Boost feature (which increases the baseline download speed by fifty percent for larger downloads) has kicked in. Both satellite Internet and DSL have bandwidths that are stuck around three megabytes per second and often quite lower, depending on where you live and how much you’re willing to pay.

Getting your Internet connection over a cable also provides a greater level of security than any kind of WiFi. In fact, there are even people who look for WiFi connections so that they can see what’s being transmitted- in effect spying on what WiFi users are looking at. Since there isn’t a good way to make muni WiFi service secure, this is a very real danger. It’s also theoretically possible to spy on satellite Internet signals as well.

Naturally, since DSL is transmitted over phone lines, it has a similar level of security to Comcast’s broad band digital cable Internet connection, but there are many other ways in which an Internet connection based on digital cable technology is superior. The fact that cables are a lot beefier than phone lines means that the signal that can be sent over them is a lot faster and more reliable. After all, skinny phone lines are subject to a lot more interference than coaxial cables and that interference can really slow things down.

All of the extra speed and reliability and security that you can get from a broad band cable Internet connection such as Comcast’s translates into a level of Internet performance that you’ve probably only experienced in libraries, coffee shops, or at work up to this point.

The Internet is an increasingly vital part of everyday life and this technology can help you make the most of it.