When it comes to their home computer, most people judge its speed by two things: how fast the computer itself is, and how much bandwidth they have to connect to the Internet.

In an Internet-connected world, bandwidth is crucial. It's a measure of how fast information -- text, images, music, video or what have you -- can flow into a computer from the Net. It's measured in bits per second (bps) either in the thousands (kilobit per second: Kbps) or in the millions (megabits per second: Mbps).

Any Internet connection 256 Kbps or faster is called "broadband" (as opposed to the "narrowband" offered by dial-up modems). The average American's broadband connection is in fact about 20 times faster than that minimum: about 4.8 Mbps.

"We have pretty good services and connection speeds compared to the other places in Virginia," said James Hatcher of Roanoke, who subscribes to Cox's 5-Mbps service.

He's right. When it comes to bandwidth, Roanoke's "pipes" -- as the connections are often referred to -- are bigger than average. In April, Cox Communications started offering Internet connections of up to 12 Mbps for $56.95 per month, which doubled the available speed.

That 12 Mbps is twice what's available in Richmond or the New River Valley, where Comcast offers 6 Mbps connections for $42.95 per month. And it's only a little slower than the 15 Mbps connections available from Cox in Fairfax and Hampton Roads for the same price.

That means the pictures Roanokers view online load faster than those of people with slower connections. The music and videos they download arrive sooner. For gamers, it means having, potentially, a fraction of a second advantage over an opponent -- and in a war game, that's crucial.

While users of slower connections can use sites such as Flickr (for photos), iTunes (for music) and YouTube (for video), having more bandwidth makes those sites more enjoyable; they spend less time waiting for their downloads and more time enjoying them.

Net-enabled video game consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation 3 allow gamers from around the world to compete -- something that's impossible without a fast connection to allow real-time interactions. And, of course, there's the extraordinarily popular sharing of music and movies -- legal or otherwise.

But available bandwidth is important to a region beyond fun, games and entertainment. It's good for the region's economy.

"It's absolutely critical, no doubt about that," said Jay Foster, president of SoftSolutions Inc. in Roanoke, which provides data analysis services to manufacturers around the world. "It's like railroads in the 1800s."

High-speed connections can be used by companies across the spectrum for tracking, routing and managing inventory, holding videoconferences, or even controlling machinery remotely. Rural areas far from health care facilities can take advantage of broadband connections to share medical information with, and get help from, doctors anywhere in the world.

SoftSolutions, for example, provides remote technical support to some of its customers, meaning technicians in Roanoke operate computers in other parts of the country -- something that's only practical with a stable high-speed connection.

In others cases, the company's customers use software on SoftSolutions' servers here. "We provide applications that run over the Internet for our customers, but you have to have the pipes to make sure they don't have delays," Foster said. "At least you can say that Roanoke, Virginia, isn't holding us back," he said.

But Roanoke has yet to enter the ranks of cities whose residents have access to the fastest consumer broadband product on the market. Verizon's Fios service offers connection speeds up to 30 Mbps. That means, for example, that downloading a full-length movie can take minutes instead of hours.

Fios isn't here in part because of lack of demand; local users haven't shown enough interest in ultra-high-speed Internet connections.

"I would never say that I wouldn't want a higher speed like 30MB if I could get it," said Scott Queen, an avid Internet user who lives in Floyd, "but truthfully I doubt that I'd need it."

Michael Pedelty, spokesman for Cox in Roanoke, said Queen's attitude is common. Cox offers four broadband options, the fastest of which is its Premier service with a connection speed of 12 megabits per second for $56.95 per month. But not many people subscribe to it, Pedelty said, opting instead to spend $15 less for the Preferred service, which offers less than half that speed.

"Roanoke tends to be a little bit of an older demographic, which means we're somewhat slower to adopt new technologies than, for instance, large urban areas," Pedelty said, where "you're going to have more gamers, you're going to have more early adopters of technology."

Queen can see the day when it's not just early adopters doing the adopting.

"As we turn toward having things like video on demand on our personal computers, higher bandwidth would definitely help," he said. "And similarly, high-end PC gaming would definitely benefit from [having] those higher bandwidths."

And that "higher bandwidth" he's speaking of isn't all that high. In Japan, where laying the communications infrastructure is cheap thanks to the country's population density, the average broadband connection is 61 Mbps, according to an April survey by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. In Korea it's 45.6 Mbps.

In fact, the U.S. ranks 15th in the world for average broadband speed, behind, among others, Finland, Portugal, Canada and Poland. (Take heart, we're faster than Luxembourg and the Slovak Republic.)

And that doesn't sit well with everyone.

"I believe that we are getting worked over," said Phillip Speck, a Roanoke-area gamer. "In Europe they have very high-speed Internet ... for what we are paying for 5 Mbps."

For Speck, it could be a matter of life or death -- virtually, anyway. If he's facing an opponent from, say, Korea across an online battlefield, his pull of the trigger could take a little longer to be received by the game. And anyone who's ever watched a Western knows it's no good to be the second fastest in a gunfight.