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
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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