– Where does all the bandwidth on the internet come from? Is there a finite amount or do they just create more and how?

Question

– Where does all the bandwidth on the internet come from? Is there a finite amount or do they just create more and how?

In: 4

Answer 1

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.