Speed of bandwidth updated for 1/2019

A typical broadband speed you might see these days on cable internet

150 Mbps down/5 Mbps up.

And a typical fiberoptic speed you might get is 50 Mbps down/25 Mbps up.

What does that translate into real data transfer speeds?

5 Mbps = 5/8 MBps or Megabyte per second or 37.5 MB per minute or 2250 MB per hour or 2 GB per hour.

8 Mbps = 1 MBps or Megabyte per second or 60 MB per minute or 3600 MB per hour or 3.5 GB per hour

25 Mbps = 3.125 or 3 1/8 Megabyte per second or 187.5 MB per minute, or 11250 MB per hour or about 11 GB per hour.

The Up speed is what matters for your backup to the cloud, since anytime you are doing backup to the cloud, you are doing upstream data transfer. Multiple devices on the same wifi box can effectively slow you down. Many Wifi boxes are rated by a number of Mbps or Gbps. Look at that, and consider the TVs, phones, tablets, appletvs and computers that will be sharing your router and your bandwidth of your high speed internet provider to choose an appropriate speed for any backing up to the cloud you might be doing and other data transfer.

Most cloud services backup your entire documents folder, unless otherwise requested. Go into your Users -> yourname folder and select Get Info from the file menu on a Mac after clicking once on that folder to get its capacity. On a PC, the capacity is usually found by clicking once on a folder, and hitting Alt-Enter. On Unix, du -k is the command that will help.

Data transfer to the cloud can be interrupted by issues with your modem or your router. Make sure you are using a WPA2 encrypted WiFi network with 802.11n or 802.11ac capabilities. Older Macs using 802.11g and 802.11b will slow down your WiFi if you have to add their network to your WiFi. Those are typically CoreSolo, CoreDuo (not Core2Duo), and pre-Mac OS X 10.6 systems. For those systems, that can't use 802.11n or 802.11ac built-in but have gigabit ethernet, at least connect them to the LAN port by ethernet with your 802.11n router to be more secure, and make sure they aren't sharing networks with other devices over WiFi. A 5G WiFi network is better than 2.4G, and realize that older 2.4 Ghz land phones can frequently interfere with your network as well. Microwaves, file cabinets, and pipes may need to have an addition relay WiFi point around them to the main router using Wireless Distribution System (WDS). Apple's Airport Express and several other routers offer that capability.

iCloud as a backup service does not have scheduled backups available. So be sure to setup your iCloud Connection when it is not going to interfere with other network activity that you may have. Some other cloud backup services do have timed backups where you don't have to manually turn on and off the backups on large backup content. By default iCloud offers 5 GB of space. If you are backing up a lot of data to the cloud and purchase additional space on iCloud, recognize the entire backup amount you select for iCloud settings will have to transfer before the backup is complete. Any changes you make to stored backup files on your computer will need to synchronize (sync) with iCloud when you turn it on if selected in the iCloud system preference (from the Apple menu).

This tip was posted on the iCloud Forum, but may be referred to on any forum.