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Geek Culture / Is it me or is the global internet slow?

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DJ Almix
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 06:20
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Honestly everything these days is reaching speeds from Megabytes to Gigabytes. Look at blueray in GB, programs in GB, Thumbnail drives, portable hard drives, and mp3 players reaching sizes from 1GB to 2TB. Now I know you can get internet reaching high speeds, but with fiber optics why are we not downloading things at gigs per seconds? Also note that all those products are popular and can be purchased at any electronics store, why not the same w/ net.

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Venge
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 06:26
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Because storage of a medium in one place and long-distance transmission of that medium are not equivalent. If you can go 80 mph in a car with half a tank of gas, why can't you go 160 mph with a full tank?


I will live forever or die trying.
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Indicium
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 06:33 Edited at: 5th Jan 2010 07:03
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Quote: "If you can go 80 mph in a car with half a tank of gas, why can't you go 160 mph with a full tank?"


Technically, If you let all that fuel burn at once, you could go 160 mph but thats not the point. Like you said, Storing something is diffent from sending something, you can have as big a warehouse as you like, but thats not going to speed up the lorries delivering the goods.

Windows Vista 32-Bit Home Premium Intel Pentium Dual-Core @ 1.46Ghz 2038mb RAM
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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 07:10
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Quote: "Now I know you can get internet reaching high speeds, but with fiber optics why are we not downloading things at gigs per seconds?"


Because electronic routers are too slow.


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Fallout
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 10:13 Edited at: 5th Jan 2010 10:14
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It's all to do with cost due to distance. There is billions of dollars of cable all over the world, twillions of dollars of routes and kazillions of dollars of slave labour driven electrons and photons. While it costs £100 to buy a new fat harddrive, just to double the throughput of the cable from your house to the local exchange would probably cost at least £100,000 to dig up all the roads (obviously the current cable probably supports way more than twice what you're getting now, but it's an example!)

Obviously that's a simplistic way of looking at things, but essentially it's cost, due to distance and complexity. It's not because it's technically impossible. So these things have to be upgraded slowly, as telecoms companies can afford to upgrade them as part of their business strategy.

Radical hamsters skipping furiously into the blue ether, questioning their very existence while breathing out the bitter fog of smoked haddock.
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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 11:19
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In the UK at least it's because our exchanges are older than the pyramids and slower than tectonic drift.

Athlon64 2.7gHz->OC 3.9gHz, 31C, MSi 9500GT->OC 1gHz core/2gHz memory, 48C, 4Gb DDR2 667, 500Gb Seagate + 80Gb Maxtor + 40Gb Maxtor = 620Gb, XP Home
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Syncaidius
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 11:20 Edited at: 5th Jan 2010 11:23
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The technology to give us all faster internet is already there, it's just the greedy ISPs sucking as much money off us as they can from slow connections before they're finally forced to upgrade our connections to something thats probably already outdated by that time.

Hell, most ISPs don't even give you the max speed your connection can handle anyway, just so they can cheap out on servers to handle it all until they're forced to upgrade when things start to go bad.

Quote: "In the UK at least it's because our exchanges are older than the pyramids and slower than tectonic drift."


I have to agree with you there.

Quote: "Because electronic routers are too slow."

Most routers can handle at least a 50Mbps connection to the internet, and I bet your not even getting half of that from your ISP.


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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 12:20 Edited at: 5th Jan 2010 15:07
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Photonic Chip = Super fast routers


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MSon
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 12:34
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I have noticed that slowly but surly, net connections in the UK have gotten faster, some of the things i do on the net now, i wouldn't have been able to do a few years ago due to not having a fast enough connection, im on 10MBPS, But the speed you receive something at may be slow no matter what you do as it depends on the equipment on the other end as well, some sites i can download a couple of gig in an hour, others you might as will not download from as there servers are far too slow.

When i finished working for BT about a year ago, they where testing the 50MBPS BB Service, and i think they had agreed to start installing Fibrotic connections instead of the old copper ones, but if you compare the UK to certain other countries, we are still falling behind.

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Neuro Fuzzy
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 13:21
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Quote: "im on 10MBPS"

Mbps, lower case b means bits. Most people on the web that i know have a 10 megabit per second connection. they use bits instead of bytes probably because it's easy to mix up the two, and bits is a bigger number, so they have a chance of tricking someone into believing that their internet connection is 8x faster

It'd be cool to see what a benevolent ISP could do to internet service. Speaking of which, how would an ISP even get started? Start out by providing internet to a small inhabited island or something?


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MSon
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 13:39 Edited at: 5th Jan 2010 13:43
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you can start a company and register it as an ISP, you then contact a company like BTWholesale and rent space in an Exchange for your equipmnt, some companies do this to keep full control, I know KFC do it, i remember seeing there account once on a registered ISP List, som others that do this include fujitsu, who can also provide free BB to some employees homes through it.

Everyone Be Cool, You, Be Cool.
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charger bandit
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 14:14
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You can have an uber fast sattelite net but if the server you are connectin to hasnt got the same speed you will only download at the speed that the server allows.

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Fallout
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 14:52
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Quote: "they use bits instead of bytes probably because it's easy to mix up the two"


It's just a standard in data communication. It's not at all clandestine, although it does catch A LOT of people out, so the ISPs are probably quite happy with the 'bit' standard.

Radical hamsters skipping furiously into the blue ether, questioning their very existence while breathing out the bitter fog of smoked haddock.
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David R
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 14:58
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Quote: "In the UK at least it's because our exchanges are older than the pyramids and slower than tectonic drift."


Actually, they're pretty modern thanks to the upgrades that happened in the late 80s and early 90s. The UK is lucky due to the fact that all of our exchanges are fairly uniform across the board (they're all modern digital telephone + IXP exchanges). As opposed to places like the US, where, whilst the best exchanges kick the crap out of ours (innercity ones, namely) they aren't uniform in the tech being used - some far flung places in the US still use a mixture of much older hardware and tech.

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 18:15
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Quote: "modern thanks to the upgrades that happened in the late 80s and early 90s"


Modern, you say?

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lazerus
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 18:34 Edited at: 5th Jan 2010 18:35
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Quote: "Actually, they're pretty modern thanks to the upgrades that happened in the late 80s and early 90s. The UK is lucky due to the fact that all of our exchanges are fairly uniform across the board (they're all modern digital telephone + IXP exchanges). As opposed to places like the US, where, whilst the best exchanges kick the crap out of ours (innercity ones, namely) they aren't uniform in the tech being used - some far flung places in the US still use a mixture of much older hardware and tech."


Yet we still average the worst connection in Europe, Whoo hoo for modern.
Never mind that, the companies are extreamly poorly equipped in high use times. Take Virgin, i fork out £25 for a 10Mbps "1200kbs" and i average 200Dl from the times of 3 - till 1. It fluxtuates from full 1200 to 1 kbs, yes 1.

Upload speed is attrocious and since the way Xbox live works, i get picked as host, then get kiked since the connection drops.

blarggg, i actaully lost connection while posting this.


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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 18:42
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Quote: "full 1200 to 1 kbs, yes 1."


1200? That's insane. Wish I could say 120 ever came up.

Athlon64 2.7gHz->OC 3.9gHz, 31C, MSi 9500GT->OC 1gHz core/2gHz memory, 48C, 4Gb DDR2 667, 500Gb Seagate + 80Gb Maxtor + 40Gb Maxtor = 620Gb, XP Home
Air cooled, total cost £160
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lazerus
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Posted: 5th Jan 2010 20:17
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I suppose Nex, but i heard that the fifth plane of oblivion had crap connection since that whole bloodbath scene, Investors pulled out an all, just leaving the broken ISP's on thier own.

So if you see a hero, kill him folks. Its for the greater good.


http://lazerus-reborn.deviantart.com/
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