Though the speed and quality of links are not the most important factors for Internet traffic, they will still affect your use of the net. In particular, you'll notice the difference (hopefully) between connecting on Campus, and connecting from home using a modem. Modems are described by their bandwidth; a typical analogue modem may have a bandwidth (or speed) of 56kb/s (kilobits per second), an ADSL modem anything between 8Mbs (ADSL) and 24Mbs (ADSL2+), FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet) 10-100Mbs and FTTH (Fibre to the Home) 150Mbs to 1Gbs. This compares to the campus ethernet network, which has bandwidths of between 100Mbs and 10Gbs (Gigabit per second). Of course, on the campus ethernet, this bandwidth is often shared between many users (eg all computers in a single building) whereas the bandwidth of your analogue modem at home is exclusively yours. Broadband (DSL) connections often state how many others you'll be sharing your bandwidth with - this is called the Contention Ratio.

A bit is a single binary digit (a zero or a one). A kilobit (kb) is about thousand bits (actually 1024, or 2 to the power 10), and a megabit (Mb) is around a million bits (1024 x 1024, or 2 to the power 20). You're probably more familiar with bytes, which are a group of eight bits, and can represent a single character or digit. Hard disk drives, for example, are measured in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB) - note that in abbreviations, bytes are capital B's and bits are lower case!