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 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.
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