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Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?
Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
I wasn't aware a few megabytes/hour constituted being a 'power user'. Why do online games always get mentioned in the same sentence as people who download 4 gigabyte movies every day?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
If you filter out all those adverts then you'll do a lot fewer DNS lookups every time you view a page.
It's adverts and multimedia which make the internet feel slow because they create many extra connections, DNS lookups, etc.
Javascript too, sometimes I go to apage with a video on it which is blocked by noscript and I give up clicking "temporarily allow XXX" before I get to the video. It's just not worth it.
Scripts from a dozen sites, adverts from a dozen others, three or four flash animations....
"There's your problem", as Mythbusters would say.
And the solution is a thing called "noscript".
No sig today...
You can be pretty damn sure the contracts are so onesided the company isn't required to really do anything.
I had this problem with a cellphone company once. Nowhere in the contract does it say that they have to actually provide the service they are selling.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Your hardcore WoW addict would probably place very little strain on your network, seeing that he wants to have the lowest ping possible. Downloading a lot of stuff would just add latency to the game.
c++;
You want to see things change? Then US voters (as if they had any power to change anything) would demand that it be ILLEGAL to sell bandwidth that DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST. That would change things in a hurry.
You're right! It would erase America from the Internet in about a week. I worked for an ISP, and the reason we oversold (by about 10x) was that the typical peak load to our upstream was less than 10% of what it could have been if everyone started a big download simultaneously. After all, my connection is mostly idle as I sit here typing this, and unless you're actively download something in the background, yours is also idle as you read it.
For reasons you mentioned, bandwidth is expensive. It's the single biggest cost in providing Internet access. If you pass a law that effectively increases Internet access fees by 900%, then don't be surprised when you can no longer buy it from American companies at any price.
On the other hand, it'd be a great opportunity for a non-American entrepreneur to park a satellite on the equator south of America and provide then-reasonable prices for access to the rest of the world.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If they delivered a fiber optic cable right into your telco box at the side of your house, gave you a fiber optic modem and could deliver VOIP, Internet, IPTV, etc., they would NOT have the capacity to service you all at the street anymore than they are now.
I work for an ISP. Our costs are getting data from our DSLAMs to the POPs. The price for Internet at a POP is essentially free. The incremental cost of getting 20 Mbps to a house is essentially free. If long core was a problem, the costs would be expensive. They aren't. So I have to presume that you are wrong. If you'd like to correct me, please tell me why it's so expensive to get data to big cities, but essentially free between LA and NY.
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