– Where does all the bandwidth on the internet come from? Is there a finite amount or do they just create more and how?
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Cables, there are giant cables across the ocean and they can lay down more, used to be shared now giant companies lay their own cables like facebook etc.
There is no such thing as “bandwidth on the Internet”. There is only bandwidth on a link between point A and point B. The link between your house and your ISP has a certain finite bandwidth, that depends on the hardware the ISP installed. More bandwidth can be added, by deploying more hardware. The link between your ISP and Reddit’s ISP is a separate thing, managed by engineers at the two companies to avoid “running out of bandwidth” because that makes Reddit look bad.
There is a finite amount of everything, because there are a finite number of atoms making up the Earth, but the available bandwidth across all the links of the Internet can be made much larger, if there is money to pay for stuff.
When people talk about bandwidth of the entire internet, they generally mean something like “if everyone was using the internet at the same time, but not quite fast enough to slow it down because of congestion, how much total data would be flowing through the network”. This is different than the sum of each individual home internet connection speed, because it is accounting for all those individual connections sharing the same global infrastructure at the same time.
This global number can be increased, by adding more connections to homes, increasing the number of servers run by ISPs to route traffic, and increasing the speed on the individual links between those servers.
Maybe I am not understanding this right.
In cars, if you want to go faster you add horsepower. The starting point of the Mississippi River is a trickle in Minnesota.
Where does all the speed come from on the internet? There is your local IP which has a certain amount of speed. There is the mid tier that has a certain amount. Level 3 and top tier have certain amounts.
Where is this “pool” of speed? There has to be a “pool” that people tap into, right?
The amount of bandwidth is determined by the medium used and the hardware the generates and reads signals. The medium can be copper cables, fiber cables, or radio signals sent through the air. Fiber cables have the most bandwidth.
The hardware that makes and reads the signals are also important. New hardware can increase the amount of bandiwdth a medium is capable of. This is very useful so you don’t need to replace all your cables, just the hardware on either end.
There’s also other ways to send data. There’s a joke protocol for sending data over carrier peigons. It was actually used as a joke too. The amount of bandwidth is determined by how much weight the carrier pigeon can hold.
You can also take a bunch of hard drives and put them in a vechicle and drive them somewhere. The bandwidth there is how much data the hard drives can hold and how many hard drives the vehicle can hold. This is a real way to transfer giant amounts of data that would take too long over the Internet.
The easiest way to think of this is that bandwidth just corresponds to the diameter of the hose that connects the various points of the internet, and the water flowing through it is the data being moved.
The bigger the hose (bandwidth), the more water (data) you can deliver. If you need more water (data) then you can replace your existing hose (bandwidth) with a larger diameter hose (larger bandwidth), or just add more hoses.
The internet is just a really big network.
In the simplest sense, a network is two interconnected devices. There’s the sender, the recipient and the connection media (wired, wireless, cables, routers, switches etc). Bandwidth is the maximum rate that the connecting media can operate.
This is different from “real world bandwidth” or “effective bandwidth”. If the sender has a 14.4kbps modem and the recipient has a 100mbit fiber link, the effective bandwidth will be close to 14.4kbps, because that’s all the sender is capable of.
So the way they add bandwidth is by either upgrading or aggregating the physical media (combining multiple slower wires to make one big fast wire), and upgrading the routing equipment to faster speeds. This is why you see those annoying Sonic ads on youtube, “Sonic installs… fiber optic blah blah blah Skip Ad”
Bandwidth is like a highway, and all the cars driving on it are packets of information. The bigger the highway, the more information can fit.
You add more bandwidth by using a bigger cable, or by using a more powerful signal. There’s also a limit to the information that a single site (like reddit) can output, which is determined by the number of servers they have. If there’s not enough servers, or they aren’t optimized very well, it doesn’t matter how big your bandwidth is because there are barely any “cars” on the “highway”.
Everyone’s bandwidth is different, and your effective bandwidth varies depending on the site. Just like how a smaller connecting road can create a traffic jam to your house, your effective bandwidth is determined by the slowest point between you and the site.
The internal components of a given electrical device can only charge and discharge so fast. That means that there is a maximum frequency within a signal they can receive before losing data from that signal. The width of the frequency band that a device can receive is it’s bandwidth. This means that only so much data can be packed into a given time slice. The higher the bandwidth, the more data per second can be sent.
This means that to create more “bandwidth”, you either need a faster device, or to have more devices operating in parallel.
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