Sony just said they’re slowing their download speeds to preserve internet capacity for everyone. Is the internet a finite resource? Why can’t everyone just use the internet at once?
In: Technology
I’m glad you asked that question. Hopefully more people will read the answers since the majority have no clue how the internet works.
Excellent answers Redditors!
It’s like lots of roads leading to bigger roads, then highways, freeways, interstates.
Like the major freeway in LA during rush hour. Can’t just keep jamming cars in there.
All the intersections can only handle certain amounts of traffic.
Internet providers oversubscribe. Suppose you have 1000 customers each with 100 megabit internet connections in some city/suburb/whatever. Logically that’s 100 gigabit of capcity and you should be able to provide that, but since users normally don’t max out their connections all the time you can easily get away with only having 1/10 that speed on the other end and only need 10 gigabits into the building where all those customers are connected from. Internet providers do this all the time. This is a huge cost savings and for decades it’s worked.
But things are different today than they were yesterday. Now those 1000 customers are at home ALL THE TIME, both parents and kids. The parents are trying to work and run video conferencing which is sensitive to internet hiccups. The kids are trying to watch Youtube and Netflix at 11 am. That’s actually very atypical. Now that 10 gigabit connection to the neighbourhood doesn’t cut it any more and everybody is suffering a little bit. And video conferencing suffering from internet problems turns into video and audio stutters pretty quickly which ruins the whole thing.
Upgrading is difficult when the ISP employees are also trying to protect themselves from COVID-19, getting the needed parts is difficult because manufacturing and trade is slowed, and of course it’s spending money that wasn’t planned and there could be trouble getting the cash needed.
So Youtube and Netflix are saying that users won’t (by default) get the highest video quality available. That probably takes a good 20% off the bandwidth they’re using, relieving some of the pressure on that 10 gigabit connection. And that is definitely appreciated by the ISPs if not by the users. Sounds like Sony is doing much the same thing.
The Internet consists of MANY different networks.
What Sony is doing is preserving THEIR Internet connection.
When you view something over the Internet, it comes to you in “Packets”. It takes a small slice of time for the Packet to go from one device (Router, Switch, Gateway,…) to the next and during that time nothing else can travel on THAT network segment. Everyone else has to wait. The bigger the “thing” being transferred the more Packets it takes. Now, the networks are FAST and are designed to weave Packets for different destinations together to no one user can appear to monopolize the link. But if enough people are trying to get content from one source, it starts to become a problem.
As far as I understand it.. think of the internet as a pipeline whenever you want to load a webpage or download a file you are basically requesting water to be sent to your tap the water being the information only so much information can be sent throw a pipe at a Time this usually isn’t a problem because not everyone is requesting information at the same time so by slowing down how much information you can get everyone gets to use the pipeline
As for why we can all just use it to it’s full potential is because the pipes aren’t big enough
Lol hope this helps
The internet is not a finite resource and everyone can access it at the same time.
What they are limiting is bandwidth. There is a finite amount of bandwidth every company can provide, which is why faster broadband costs more, because you get allocated more bandwidth.
At the moment so many people want access consistently at the same time that Sony is obligated to provide more than they have access to, which usually would not be a problem because only a % of customers would use the internet at the same time.
But with this crisis, they are effectively overbooked. They have sold more access than they can provide at once.
The internet is connected people to servers. An analogy would be that Sony post everyone their games. Because everyone is at home they have more post than normal. To stop them being overwhelmed (the servers crashing) they slow down the rate at which they send out the post which in turn means that everyone gets their post a bit slower.
The internet is a network of computers that talk to each other over wires (or optical fibers).
There are a lot of these wires, but they work a bit like roads: there are lots and lots and lots of tiny, low capacity wires going between your house and the local exchange, then lots of bigger ones between towns and cities, and just a few very big ones going between countries and continents.
These wires aren’t actually bigger… we just group lots of them together: like lanes on a highway. Your street may have 2 lanes, then your highway has 4, and the interstate has 8. Just like roads, the wires can get clogged up with too much traffic.
How does that traffic work? Well, imagine that you have a friend who lives across the street, and you communicate by turning your bedroom light on and off: that’s kind of how the internet works: computers send signals to each other by turning the signal on and off on the wire very very quickly.
There are limits to how fast they can transmit or read the signal, though – so each wire has a limited amount of bandwidth. We can make the network faster by making faster computers that can read/transmit the data faster, or by adding more connections… but there are still limits to how much data we have at any time.
It isn’t worth adding wires to have 5x more capacity than we need, just like we don’t build 5x more interstates than we need… it would be a waste of money. Normally that’s fine, but at times like now when tens of millions of people are working from home or staying at home instead of going out, we need more capacity than usual.
The internet is like a postal service where you get to ask the library to deliver you copies of their books, copies of the daily newspaper from the newspaper stand, or a shopping list from a shop.
The library/newspaper stand/shop has a limited amount of postmen they can talk to over a given time in order to give them the requested packages to over a given time, the post office has a limited space to store the packages to be sent, and the packages often arrive from far away, so they have to be sent over many post offices until they arrive.
This is basically the internet, but all those people above are computers so everything is really fast. The cables have an upper limit of how much data they can send, and the computers have a limited power to process all the packages they have to send forward somewhere.
The internet is really just a bunch of computers connected together over a large distance. When you watch a movie or look at a website, you’re sending a message to another computer (called a server) saying ‘hey, can you send me this?’, to which the server will respond by sending the data back to you. There’s an upper limit to the amount of data the server can send over the internet to people. For argument’s sake, let’s say a server can send out 1000 data over an hour. That’s a physical limit on what it can send. Normally there are 10 people online, so it’s fine to let them each download 100 data an hour. Now suddenly 50 people are online – we can’t give them 100 data each, because that’s over the limit of what we can send from the server, so we have to cap them at 20 per hour. Now everyone can download from the server, but not as quickly.
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