Do you have dial-up internet? Forget about online gaming.

Computer games have evolved significantly since the days of electronic checkers. Today, we have computer games that are more impressive than some 21st-century movies, and the interest in online gaming is growing rapidly. Once dominated by males aged 25 and older, today's gaming generation includes mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, and even grandfathers! If you think you have caught the online gaming bug and want to become a participant, don't even consider using a dial-up internet

connection to join in on this online fun! 

The fascination with online gaming lies in its speed. During play, online gaming becomes a virtual world that projects a sense of reality into the mix. Its games are fast, its movements are smooth, and its sounds are as realistic as we hear them in the natural world. Sitting in front of an online game and actively participating in it puts the player in another world - a world that's different, cool, and real. 

We're not talking about a super-fancy version of checkers or backgammon. We're talking about full-fledged networked or multiplayer gaming that allows anyone to entertain themselves and others across the world at the same time. Multiplayer games are played online, but trust us when we say that any old internet connection won't do. 

If you want to get in on this craze, you'll have to ditch your old dial-up connection and switch to broadband. A broadband internet connection will give you the ability to send and receive highly detailed and realistic imagery at an appropriate speed. It will give you the means to watch videos in real-time and allow you to experience speech as if every other player were speaking to you directly. 

A dial-up internet connection just can't handle this kind of fun, but you can get a broadband connection just as easily. For the techies out there, broadband is a type of data transmission in which a single medium (wire) can carry several channels at once. For the rest of us, broadband is an internet connection that allows several people to send and receive data at the same time. A dial-up connection doesn't do that. A dial-up connection can either send or receive, but it certainly can't do both. Let's talk about Broadband ISDN for a minute. 

ISDN stands for integrated services digital network, and it can transmit voice, video, and data over fiber optic telephone lines at about 64 Kbps (64,000 bits per second). Most ISDN lines offered by telephone companies give you two lines at once, called B channels. You can use one line for voice and the other for data, or you can use both lines for data to give you data rates of 128 Kbps, three times the data rate provided by today's fastest modems. 

Broadband ISDN - a combination of regular broadband and ISDN - can transmit voice, video, and data over fiber optic telephone lines at about 1.5 million bits per second (bps). It's a much faster connection than either broadband or ISDN alone! If your ISP offers Broadband ISDN, ask for it - your online gaming adventure will be better for it.