When I first started using the Internet, it wasn't that far removed from its Arpanet ancestor. When I was at school, I could connect with it at a blazing fast 10 Megabits per second (Mbps) over Ethernet. From home or on the road I could only hook up at 300 bits per second (BPS) using both a TI Silent 700 paper terminal with its acoustic coupler or from a CP/M computer using a Hayes Smartmodem 300. It was great in its day, but it was never fast enough. Today, I have a cable internet connection that, in theory, can get up to 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps). It's still not fast enough. That's because back then all I was working with was text and even that was limited to 25 lines with 80 columns per line. It's a different story now. Today, I do video conferencing, watch 4K TV shows and movies, and pour gigabytes of data across the net. I really can use a Gbps connection. But what about you? Your local Internet service providers (ISP) will happily give you recommendations on their websites, but keep in mind they want to sell you more bandwidth. ISPs can also mislead you about what they can actually deliver. Over the years, I've been told by ISPs they could hook me up with connections they literally physically couldn't deliver. And let's not even talk about their speed guarantees, which more often than not are wishful thinking. So, here's a good list of what you're probably doing on the net and how much bandwidth you need to do the tasks without wanting to tear your hair out. For example, right now, my partner is streaming the 4K TV show Shadow and Bone. I'm backing up my video archives, which run to terabytes of data, to my remote Nextcloud server while checking e-mail in the background and looking at websites. In a few minutes, I'll be at a work video conference. So, altogether, I'm currently using 100Mbps.  You must also keep in mind that what ISPs promise they'll deliver in the way of bandwidth often isn't what you get. For example, the Federal Trade Commission, along with law enforcement agencies from six states, recently sued Frontier Communications, alleging that the company didn't provide many consumers with the internet speeds it promised them. And, adding insult to injury, the company charged many of them for more expensive and higher-speed service than was actually provided. In my experience, this is all too common. According to AllConnect, a company that helps users find the best telecommunication deals, "15% of internet users, or 45 million people, are getting less than their advertised speeds." Of those, "Fiber and cable internet have the biggest gap – with most people getting, on average, about 55% of the speeds they pay for." Even if you are paying for high bandwidth, you may not always get it. ISPs often throttle your service if you're a "heavy" internet user or during "times of high traffic." To see if this is happening to you, run a speed test, and note the results. Then download and turn on a good virtual private network (VPN). Usually, your numbers will be less when you're running a VPN. Security comes at a performance cost. But, if you get better speed with a VPN, odds are you're being throttled. Finally, if you really aren't getting enough bandwidth with your current plan and you have no other options, I hate to say it, but you can always pay for a higher-level plan to get the speed you really need. If you do have a choice of ISPs and internet delivery technologies, I recommend, in this order, the following connection types: Fiber, the fastest of the fast; cable, can be good on downstream speeds, but tends to be much slower on upstream; and LEO satellite and 5G internet are both good, but they're still in their teething stages and their performance can be erratic. Then, there are the connections I can't recommend, but if you have no other choice in the matter, well then you have no other choice. DSL, when you can still get it, is decent with real-world speeds in the double-digit Mbps down and single-digit Mbps up. But AT&T is getting out of the DSL business so you can no longer get it. If your DSL connection goes out, I've had AT&T customers tell me Ma Bell won't fix it. Traditional satellite internet companies, HughesNet and Viasat are better than nothing if you live out in the country. But their download speeds max out, in my experience, at 30Mbps. Upload speeds are stuck around 3Mbps. The real killer though is the latency. With 300 to 500 milliseconds between pressing a key and seeing a result, video gaming and conferencing are next to impossible to pull off. Both services have data caps that will slow your down speeds to about 3Mbps if you use too much data. Get better informed by visiting OUR FORUM.

Facing the US government suppression, China's technology giant Huawei has reshuffled its business structure since late 2019, investing more resources in software innovation to become a top provider of smart digital solutions to help strengthen a broad variety of Chinese enterprises - industrial manufacturers, public utilities, internet-based platforms, financial service providers, catering and entertaining businesses. Huawei's forced business transformation, ironic in the eyes of many Western industrial analysts, is instrumental to enhancing the global competitiveness of Chinese companies, while make itself even more a formidable ICT hardware and software technology colossal, enabling it to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Google, Apple, Microsoft and other global technology leaders. Armed with Huawei's state-of-the art integrated digital solutions - borne from the company's advanced 5G, cloud and AI technologies, Chinese businesses across a wide spectrum of industrial lines are poised to gain in the level of technology upgrade, corporate governing efficiency and business profitability. Huawei has worked out a plan to make new inroads into expanding its enterprise business sector, in addition to its mobile telecom gear and consumer devices business, and the enterprise business helped the company win more than 100 billion ($15 billion) of business revenue in 2020, growing 23 percent from 2019. At the end of 2020, the company had over 30,000 corporate partners in China. And, more than 19,000 other partners have joined Huawei Cloud Partners program. It is believed that a thriving technology ecosystem centered on Huawei's smart solutions will thrust many Chinese businesses to a new level of modernization, which will enable them to better compete with rivals from the US and other developed economies. At a time when US President Joe Biden refuses to abandon his predecessor Donald Trump's notorious trade and technology war, obsessively chanting his slogan to engage in a "fierce competition" with China, the strategy switch of Huawei and other leading tech companies in China is expected to keep in lockstep with the Chinese central government's new pivot to the "Dual Circulation" economic growth, by focusing on domestic market expansion, and, at the same time supplemented with exploration of overseas markets. The former Trump administration, concerned about the rising capability of Huawei, imposed very strict restrictions on the company by putting it on US government's Entity List in middle 2019, banning export of all advanced semiconductor chips and other technologies to Huawei. In 2020, Huawei was forced to spin off the Honor phone business, and the production of other advanced Huawei smart phones, tablets and digital devices was largely impaired, leading to withering sales and market shares both at home and abroad. But the technology giant won't cower to the US' reckless crackdown. Realizing the world's leading semiconductor makers are forbidden by Washington to manufacture semiconductor chips for the company, Huawei decided to shift to explore new frontiers of technology. Thanks to its strong financial fundamentals, Huawei has invested heavily in recruiting thousands of talented people, who are driving new technology innovations. And, the company's efforts have led to "pops" in new technologies, which will help Huawei to garner streams of new revenues in the coming months and years. Lately, Huawei has officially launched its Harmony or Hongmeng operating system which is expected to be embedded with more than 300 million digital consumer devices in 2021, mostly in China's mainland market. The integrated software system, connecting smart phones, laptops, tablets, smart TV sets, other home appliances and the inner-car screens and more, is innovated for the upcoming new era of "Internet of Things (IOT)". For more please visit OUR FORUM.