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Broadband Connection Getting Slower? Here's Why...Part I
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29-Dec-2008
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We all remember the days of dial up Where you could spend anywhere from one to five minutes waiting to actually get online, fifteen seconds to a minute (or more...) for each page to load, and the fond dream of these things called E-mail 'attachments'. Of course, that was dial up in 1999. Dial up in the mid-'90s was a wonderful thing...so long as you had 56k. Those 28.8k and 33.6k connections, those were the 'real' dial up of the day. You could even shill out exorbitant amounts of money on an ISDN connection, which essentially ran twice the speed of 56k, and even allowed you to talk on the phone while on the Internet (sort of...).
Then came broadband. It was a new millennium, and a new age of the Internet. And now 56k, and the rarer still ISDN, were just too slow. Broadband was the new must have. Do you see a pattern emerging?
The same is true with the Internet as is true with computers in general, their speed of computing doesn't change, it's simply the thing being computed that changes. A 56k modem runs at the same speed it always did; it was the pages themselves that were updated. You could pull your Commodore 64 out of the attic, and sure enough, it would run its programs as fast as ever. Try browsing the Web with its 300bps modem, however, and, well...try loading any page.
Many providers today are offering the 'next generation' of broadband; 'turbo', 'racer', 'fiber', et cetera. Which all sounds very familiar to what we heard at the dawn of 56k and broadband itself. That being said, this new age of 'slow speed' is something else entirely. And that is because of the nature of the Internet itself, a really corrupt scam called 'net neutrality', and an unfortunate bankruptcy of the backbone provider at the advent of broadband.
How The Internet Works
There is surprisingly a lot more to the Internet than simply 'connecting' and browsing. The Internet is a singular entity (which is why it is always capitalized) which comprises all networks that are connected to each other that operate on an agreed upon list of protocols. There are many networks that are not part of the Internet, some of which cover many areas and people; this is particularly true with large corporate networks.
When you 'connect to the Internet', you are in fact simply connecting to your provider. Your provider is the one that is connected to the Internet. And that is really where the problem begins. As previously indicated, Internet providers are not keeping up with the times, and are charging you as though they are. Which should be illegal, but I guess is attributed to good advertising. Read the previous article for more information on the backbone side of the issue, but there is another issue with the way the Internet is setup. And that is with the Web sites themselves.
In order for you to be able to browse the Internet, you have to be able to reach a Web site. This is done through Web hosting, and this is what has changed significantly from the days of dial up to the present age of broadband. Web hosting used to be a more decentralized operation, whereby companies would typically host locally at their provider's Network Operations Center or Point Of Presence. This was really a very ideal scenario as local businesses had an almost direct line to their local customer base, nationwide traffic was not over saturated, and individual networks were not nearly so bogged down with routing other networks traffic. That no longer is the case.
With the advent of the broadband backbone, the rise of independent hosting companies rose considerably. These are companies that do not have a local subscriber base, and instead rely on their large leased lines (T-3, OC-3 and higher) and the Internet itself in order for their sites to reach subscribers. This brings the exact opposite effect of the decentralized situation. Companies in New York might be hosting in Los Angeles, Calgary, even Mumbai. Which means every user navigating to that site is saturating all the connections in between. As you start to compound this, the bandwidth allocated to each user decreases, further increasing the duration length that the lines is saturated – for that one solitary request batch. The Internet has officially reached the stage of morning rush hour gridlock. Unfortunately, it's a 24/7 problem.
To be continued in parts 2 and 3... |
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