Broadband Internet access, often shortened to "broadband Internet" or just "broadband", is a high data-transmission rate Internet connection. DSL and cable modem, both popular consumer broadband technologies

In practice, the advertised bandwidth is not always reliably available to the customer; ISPs often allow a greater number of subscribers than their backbone connection can handle, under the assumption that most users will not be using their full connection capacity very frequently. This aggregation strategy works more often than not, so users can typically burst to their full bandwidth most of the time.