Why a Really Fast Internet Connection is Useless
We all remember in the early days of the Internet when we had to use a dial-up modem to connect to the modem. Opening one single web-page could often take several minutes and being able to use the Internet, the modem had to call a specific phone number which created a sound, which is what we associate with this time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE). It was in the good old days. Most people used Windows 98 with Internet Explorer and using the internet was expensive since we had to pay for how long our connection was open and how much data was transferred.
Today we sit on a far far faster connection and we do not have to pay for how much data we send/receive. Most people are using ADSL or cable modems and some users luckily got a fiber connection to the Internet. All the money is on the speed to the Internet. The most speed you have, the faster you can download data. Schools and companies often have a faster connection since more users are using the net at the same time than private internet users.
Some people often pay a lot of money in order to have the fastest Internet connection available. Sure, a connection around 50Mbit in download rate would fit well if you have 5 kids that download movies and streamed music at the same time. Otherwise, a fast connection is more or less useless.
My ISP called me a few weeks ago and asked if I wanted to upgrade my current fiber connection on 25/25Mbit to a 50/50Mbit since they where having an offer on this plan. Amazingly, I said no. Neither me or my parents need that kind of speed. I sure do download and stream music and videos, but a faster connection is actually useless. In fact, I even rarely use my maximum capacity. Last time when I was downloading content to Halo 4 on my xbox, I had a connection capable of receiving ca. 100Mbit/second (in theory it is 10Gigabit but it is shared among others), and the download speed was around 550KB/s (4.4Mbit/sec). Microsoft's server did not have the capacity to push out data on my super-fast connection. When downloading content from sites such as download.com, the download speed rarely peeks 1MB/s.
A faster Internet connection would of course have an impact on how fast websites loads. The faster your connection is, the faster the site would load. A lot of this is wrong. If we say we have the fastest computer in the world with the fastest browser there is running through a 20Mbit connection, we would not see much difference if we compare it with a normal computer today. A normal web-page is rarely above 1 megabyte, so it should load instantly. In many cases this is wrong. Popular websites such as xbox.com, Paypal.com and Netflix.com can often take up to half a minute regardless of my internet connection speed. Why is it so slow? We have a "fast" connection, our computer is fast, so what is wrong?
There are a lot of factors involved in how fast a webpage loads. DNS resolving, connection handshaking and SSL are all causing overhead and causing the page to load a bit slower. In most cases, these are not to blame when it comes to loading webpages. There are in general two "main causes". The first one is that the web-server is too far away from its visitors. If you test your internet connection to a server in China, you would have a totally different speed if you connect to a server that is close to you on speedtest.net. (Given that you are far away from China) The other one is slow web-servers. This can be the cause of poor dynamic page programming, a slow database-server, or a web-server that is poorly maintained. Many people would blame the platform which the websites dynamic page language is written in, however this is not the case. A slow PHP forum is around as slow as the Xbox homepage written in ASP.NET.
The point of this post is that more and more users are getting faster internet connections than the servers' internet connection around the world. However, it does not only apply to the internet connection, also slow websites are affected. Sure, a 1Gbit connection from Google would be nice, but it is actually useless unless you have some special needs (eg. if you are some institution with hundreds of employees or hosting a website-cluster). Here is how fast some of the websites I often visit loads. Please not I am on a 25/25Mbit connection through wireless connection and a mid-end laptop running SSD with Window 8 and Chrome (Ordered by loading time, fastest first):
|
Website |
Speed (s) |
|
Google.com |
1 |
|
Nrk.no |
1,40 |
|
Imgur.com |
1,50 |
|
Aftenposten.no |
2,50 |
|
Youtube.com |
2,60 |
|
Twitter.com |
4 |
|
Reddit.com |
4,10 |
|
Facebook.com |
4,30 |
|
News.cnet.com |
5 |
|
Paypal.com |
6,70 |
|
Netflix.com |
7 |
|
Xbox.com |
12,40 |