Hi everyone,
Not too experienced in networking and I have seen a lot of talk about this lately.
As a consumer, doesn’t only the download speed only really matter? Unless you are uploading videos to YouTube or something?
In: Technology
The other posts here are more accurate from a general ELI5 perspective, but here’s a little more from the nuts and bolts side of things.
So, much (most) of the network traffic on the Internet uses a protocol called TCP. TCP has a built-in mechanism to check if a data packet makes it to where it needs to go, or if we need to resend it.
It’s kinda like read receipts on a text message. Your phone sends my phone a read receipt notification when you’ve received and read the message I sent you.
Now for the kicker: if these “read receipts” don’t make it back to the sender, the sender is going to try to resend that message. This will delay any new messages from being sent, until the sender gets a “read receipt” or the sender waits for too long.
Without sufficient upload bandwidth and with enough usage on your Internet connection, there’s a small risk of those “read receipt”/acknowledgement messages being delayed or dropped. Which would slow down how fast you can receive data while downloading or streaming something.
99.9% of the time, this won’t be a problem, because these “read receipts” are very, very, very small compared to other types of network traffic.
Latest Answers