For example. Fiber. What makes someone able to host a fiber connection. Is everything accesible at fiber speeds undoubtedly connected via fiber connection somwhere along the line? When accessing a website hosted on a non fiber connection, do networks pull cached versions for faster results?
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> What makes someone able to host a fiber connection
Having a physical fibre cable to their building/office/home(there is fiber to the street, building and home, dependig where your cable ends).
> Is everything accesible at fiber speeds undoubtedly connected via fiber connection somwhere along the line?
Im not sure what fiber speeds are supposed to be, i would guess it just means “fast” i dont think i means actualy using optic glass fibre cables.
Your local router uses copper(phone) lines or newer fiber cables to connect to the “backbone” of the internet, these are giant cables that are mostly made out of fiber but can be copper too.(the big transatlantic cables you might have seen are fiber).
The connection speed between two computers is allways the slowest speed of any node between them, aka a bottleneck.
> When accessing a website hosted on a non fiber connection, do networks pull cached versions for faster results?
Not per default, big platforms use CDNs(content delivery networks, just thousands of webservers all over the planet) to cache and distribute their content to have faster loading times.
there is always a bottleneck in every network connection. that’s the one thing that limits your download speed.
it might be the internet connection to your house, it might be your computer. it might be your WiFi signal is too weak or there’s too much activity on it.
your ISP has a lot of bandwidth, they only sell some of it to you. if everyone on the same isp is using all their allocated bandwidth, the isp might not have enough bandwidth to cope, so might become the bottleneck.
the website might be the bottleneck if their isp doesn’t give them a lot of bandwidth. if a lot of people are hitting the site at the same time, they might not be able to serve requests very fast. most websites are hosted on professional services, however, like aws or azure. big data centers with lots of bandwidth available. it’s unlikely you’ll run into limitations on a site hosted like this, although they might run into data limit caps if they suddenly become popular.
in addition, a website might put as much as it can into a content delivery network, or cdn. for example, any images, static styles, html templates might all go on there. a cdn’s job is to serve parts of a website to you as fast as it can, from a location as near to you as possible. it’s a cache of sorts that the website explicitly uses. it’s entire existence is based on it having lots of bandwidth.
the internet cables you use at home are different from the ones used in datacenters. copper wires can be very fast, for example the different components inside your computer communicate via copper wires. its just much harder to achieve that over long distances with copper wires.
caching on a network is just a computer build for that purpose, its not that different from whats in your phone or laptop, its all copper and silicone transistors where the signal passes through. its just that those things can be blazingly fast. usually these servers clusters that do this are called the content delivery network, or CDN for short. they have clusters of those servers all over the world where it is needed, and distribute new content slowly to all those CDN’s from a central server. usually CDN’s aren’t build for a single site or company.
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