: how does NASA have and maintain insane downloading and uploading internet speeds?
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NASA have a lot of different locations around the world and each of them have their own network links to each other and others. So it is not fair to compare a home Internet connection or even a University campus Internet connection to the entire NASA organization as they are completely different. The individual high speed links are available on the commercial market from communications providers. You can rent fiber links and get insane speeds through them. It does cost a bit but the cost per gigabit is much lower then your regular Internet service. NASA need these links to send research data between their different laboratories, supercomputers and antenna complexes. Some of these locations are run by NASA, some by universities and collages and some by private contractors. Where these communication lines happens to intersect commercial Internet providers there tends to be a link to the rest of the Internet, often free of charge as the effort to deliver is so low. The Internet is designed in such a way that traffic will find the shortest way automatically so you can set up these connections any way you want and it will just work.
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