I’m just curious what the bottlenecks are and what has been done to improve those. Because I remember when it would take 10 seconds to send an imessage and now I can watch YouTube when my connection is solid. Just impressive and I’m curious about it.
In: Technology
There are two kinds of relevant speeds here:
– Latency is how long it takes for an action you make to reach a server on the Internet, and for a small response to make it back to you.
– Throughput is the amount of information-per-second that can be transmitted.
Latency is extremely important for tasks like browsing the web or using Google Docs. Throughput is extremely important for streaming video.
Throughput has improved by launching more satellites and by improving the radio technology. Latency to satellites can only be improved by having satellites in a lower orbit. Satellites are far enough away that it takes the radio waves (which move at light speed) a noticeable amount of time to go back and forth, and those in a higher orbit have significantly higher latency.
When flying over land, many in-flight WiFi now use ground-to-air instead of satellites. The Internet provider built a large number of towers, similar to cell phone towers, with antennas pointed at the sky. These style of networks have much better latency, but only over land (they can’t build towers in the middle of the ocean).
If you take an international flight over a large ocean, latency may still be problematic though the throughput may be good.
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