I remember as a kid though we had slow internet if my brother would be downloading music nothing would load at all and I’d have to wait for him to finish downloading it. But today though I have 500 megabit down, I can watch YouTube, play games on my PC like CoD, while my brother and his wife are watching not one not two but three streams of sports and that’s not even including our phones and idle devices.
What changed in the 12 or so years? Besides from our speed unless if that’s just it
In: Technology
Internet speeds 12 years ago were largely adequate for 1 user to do whatever they wanted. Youtube existed and played back at 360p or so.
But streaming in general has become SO much more prevalent that you don’t think about it any more. Rather than waiting for music to finish downloading, copy it onto your music player and listening to it from there, instead you listen to it as it arrives like some kind of private radio station/streaming site.
While the speed increases have been huge, the home scenario you described would still be adequately served by ~75 megabit internet. 500 is overkill. What matters is that streaming from the cloud has significantly replaced downloading, and waiting for your content to arrive ahead of using it is largely a thing of the past.
As for routers, the core of the internet uses conceptually the same stuff as it always has, just the newest generation with faster connections. Our home routers have upgraded from 100 megabits to gigabit on all ports including the internet uplink, and 5 GHz wifi is the new golden standard. Hurray to progress I guess…
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