Speed of Internet Connection

Realistically, how slow is 6 mbps on a broadband connection compared to a 16 mbps connection?

I understand it affects download speed and website download (thus load) times, but is the margin easily noticeable?

well


6 (megabits per second) = 0.75 megabytes per second
16 (megabits per second) = 2 megabytes per second

The 16mbps connection is 2 and 2/3 times faster than the 6mbps connection.

basically take whatever's advertised and divide it by eight to get your actually understandable speed.

8bits in 1byte
mb and mB aren't the same thing.

but not a lot of people know that.

It really depends on how you use it if you'll really notice the difference, but obviously with +275% speed things change. General usage probably not, downloading/torrenting & streaming several PCs simultaneously, noticeable. If you're going the DSL route however, have your telco see if you can even get the 16MB, your lines might not be quite that good.

@MuscleWizard;

Really it's mostly meaningless. Your theoretical speed improvements fail to take into account that the download speed cap applies on both ends of the connection.

Just because you can download 'up to 16mb' simultaneously doesn't mean the sites you visit are going to sending you any faster than their own cap which is usually less than 512 kbps.

Since the average website or similar is significantly less than 512k per page anyway the distinction between the two limits is non-existent for the vast majority of activities.

The only point you'd notice a difference is for large downloads and torrents and similar, but again, the other side's cap will have an equal and most likely negating impact.
An easy example would be most video download sides only letting you have around 512kbps, whether that's one file, or 3, and only letting you download up to 5 files at a time. Any speed in excess of 1mbps is going to be plateau'd.

With 16 MBPS download speeds you could however do about 10 of those sites at a time comfortably, where as with 6 you could not. Assuming you have a hard drive that can keep up with those write speeds, and the rest of your network can handle that much throughput.

Think of this increase being expanding a highway from 6 lanes to 16, rather than actually increasing the speed at which vehicles travel on it, because that's really more of what it signifies.

I think you should be more worried about line quality and distance from the server you play on. You can have an awesome 30mbps connection, but if your ping blows, then get ready for crazy.