214 CHAPTER 31 Internet History (Web and Browser Caching) in the early days of the Internet, nearly everyone accessed the Internet via dial-up modem service. This type of Internet access is very slow compared to the high- speed Internet services available today. The speed difference in the connections is orders of magnitude: l l l The fastest single-channel dial-up modem is rated at 56KB or 56,000 bits per second, although the modem cannot actually achieve that speed. The typical high-speed Internet connection today is 3 to 6 megabits per second or 6,000,000 bits per second. New services are currently coming on line at 50 megabits per second or 50,000,000 bits per second. To quantify those numbers, consider that at 56KB/Sec a 10MB file would take approximately 24 minutes to download. At 5MB/Sec, the same file would take approximately 10 seconds to download. At 50MB/Sec it would take less than a second. For that reason, Internet caching on the local computer has been around a long time to improve the browsing experience for the Internet user. On the other hand, the web server that supplies web pages for viewing by