Broadband Speeds

can someone tell me what is Mpbs, & Mbps...
i am currently receiving 54 Mpbs, is this fast, is this typical?
when I go over cross town i am recieving 11 Mbps of course this is WiFi.
my cable company offer 6 Mpbs as their hightest speed. if that is their highest speed, why when i am WiFi (ing) i am getting these higher speeds.
can some explain to me what this all means???
thank you

 

54 Mbps is your network connection, not internet bandwidth. In actuality, it ends up ebing around 22 Mbps throughput, give or take. That equates to 2.75 megabytes per second, of actual throughput, give or take.

A 6Mbps connection would allows you to download at a max of 750 kilobytes a second(assuming no overhead) , or .75 megabytes per second.

 

thank you for reply, but since i am kinda slow at this stuff, i am not sure what all that means.
i do understand that this speed i am seeing is networking and not internet, i thank you for clarifing that.
so what kind of speed is needed for... lets says gaming on the net? or this new satelittle tv one can watch on one's pc.
can you help me with that?

 

May be this can Help.

http://www.ezlan.net/Internet_Speed.html

http://www.ezlan.net/net_speed.html

.

 

golly, i do thank you for the web sites, they gave so much info on the speed thing. i have been to best buy, circuit city, and some others, and i would leave there more confused then when i went in....
again THANKS!!!!
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!