And additionally, how does higher quality internet change that?
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ISP Technician here.
The Internet is a series of signals that have power and specific frequencies, those frequencies and bandwidth are shared. This also depends on Cable, DSL or Fiber. So think of it like walking through a hallway, Sometimes walking from one end of the hallway to the other only takes a short period of time. This is low usage, then you have the other high usage (peak hours). This hallway is the same as the first one, but… Instead of 100 people in this hallway, we now have 3,000. still just the same you’ll get where you are going but it’s slower due to the shared bandwidth.
Now why does higher quality internet change that: Firstly this question comes across several ways so I’ll assume you mean speeds and type of connection. Speeds being higher are two parts, one being how quickly you can access something. Because of the faster speeds and the effect on your overall experience. Because it isn’t losing as much bandwidth. When the load is high you’ll drop speed due to loss of bandwidth but similar to what the lower plan felt like before you went higher. Secondly ISPs can throttle people and assign their priority, more money? Higher priority.
Types of connections matter too, different types have different amounts of bandwidth and speed. DSL being the oldest, no speeds higher than 3-100Mbps depending on the DSL setup, some providers are DSL getting 80 some get 2. Second cable is the one we have used since the 2000s is the second best with bandwidth and speed delivery. Thirdly Fiber, fiber is the highest capacity and speeds currently available, this started for data centers and spread to others.
Hope this helps if you have questions let me know.
Edit: Erisod also explained it a bit more in-depth but you asked to be explained like you are five so I went super basic. For a more in-depth but still easy to understand read theirs.
It’s not a perfect metaphor but you can think of the quality of internet like the size of a road your house might be on. A narrow road will only allow a small number of cars to flow while a wider one will allow for many more. This is one element of the quality of a home internet connection, “bandwidth”.
There is also the matter of latency. Latency refers to how long a message sent takes. In the road metaphor this would be how long the road is. You could have a long road whether it is narrow or wide.
The internet uses packets which are a lot like a car with passengers or cargo. Data is encoded into packets and then sent off to the destination.
The latency of a connection doesn’t really change as long as you can send packets, as long as you can send them. Sort of like trying to turn into a busy road if there are no gaps you’ll need to wait and that can make things slower.
Eventually if you try to put so much traffic on any internet connection most users won’t be able to send packets out.
How many users an internet connection can support depends on what each user wants to do. It’s far more “cars on he road” when watching YouTube and far far fewer for, say, reddit.
To actually explain it without any tech words:
Think of it like the internet is having to go through tubes.
More people trying to put things through the tube the slower it goes.
A higher quality tube lets more stuff go through more easily.
Hmm. If there is water tank with 1000 gallon water in it.
There are 10 water tap outlets.
Those 10 water taps are connected to water tank with single pipe. That pipe has limited capacity to transfer water. If you open all 10 tap outlets. Water will come out slowly.
Main bottleneck is usually the transfer pipe. In your case internet speed will be divided into multiple outlets slowing it for single user.
Imagine the internet as a series of tubes. The more people you try to squeeze into those tubes, the more crowded and slower it gets. That’s why we have to upgrade our infrastructure to include information superhighways, much like interstate superhighways!
Water through pipes was always how i liked to explain it, connect one hose to a water pipe and it flows fast, Connect enough hoses and eventually you get just a trickle.
Quality would affect the size of the water pipe, larger pipe more hoses.
Bandwidth explanations are going very well, but I would add one other effect: a popular site you might be trying to reach. Suppose the site is good at handling 1000 requests at a time (not realistic number, but good enough for this purpose), but something has made them very very interesting to the internet and lots and lots of requests are coming in all at once.
Picture this as a very large Wendy’s that can handle 1000 cars at once. But today, for some reason, 5000 requests are coming at once, and behind them are another 5000, and behind them another…. The lines are going to back up. They’ll keep managing their 1000 requests at a time, maybe even a few more, but they just can’t keep up with all the customers.
This situation resolves only after enough people realize they aren’t going to get their 50-cent-off hamburger and go away.
The internet is like a highway. When there are only a few cars on the highway, they can go really fast. But when there are a lot of cars on the highway, they have to go slower because there isn’t enough room for all of them to go fast. It’s the same with the internet. When only a few people are using it, they can go really fast. But when a lot of people are using it, it gets slower because there isn’t enough room for all of the data to go through at once.
It does not.
There is a finite quantity of data that can pass through your connection per unit of time. This is called bandwidth.
If it can do 10Mbps, you use 4Mbps and someone else uses 4Mbps, you will not see a difference.
However, if you use 6 Mbps and then someone tries to use more than 4, at least one of the 2 will have a slower speed.
“Higher quality internet” in technical terms refers to errors and losses. If there are issues on the line and you lose 10% of the data, said data can be transfered again, or is really lost depending on the method of transfer (protocol) used.
Salesmen often mean “more expensive” when they say “higher quality internet”, since losses are not really under their control. Sometimes they mean higher bandwidth.
Why does traffic flow decrease during peak hour? Because more cars are on the highways on the way home from work. Think of wifi as a highway of data being uploaded and downloaded, and each person using the wifi network equates to extra cars on the data highways, meaning more traffic. Get a better quality network connection, and you have a data highway with extra lanes, less traffic stops, increased speed limits
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