The Internet Bottleneck

Modern personal computers have been fast enough to handle almost any task an everyday user could ask them to do, and they have been doing this for years. Wireless connection speeds have climbed to the point that 802.11N is over 100Mps, that’s the same speed as an Ethernet cable plugged directly into your computer. Within your network at home or at the office you should be able to transfer files seamlessly between the computers in your network. However, there is a real problem, more and more services are going into the cloud. With your application not on your speedy personal computer and placed on a remote server somewhere on the internet, you are at the mercy of the speed of your internet connection; It’s like a step backwards in speed because of your internet connection hasn’t caught up to the speed of your network connection.

The internet in all of its wonder is not the same for everyone everywhere. The vast majority of people connected to the internet do not have a 100 Mps connection, so your connection is not going to keep up with the hardware that you have. In my home I have a DSL connection of 3 Mps download speed that usually is running at 1.5 Mps.  Some cable internet providers offer 15 Mps of download speed but that still doesn’t come close to the 100 Mps speed that your computer can handle. Even if you have a 15 Mps connection you are still only going to go as fast as the slowest connection. For instance If computer A has a 15Mps connection and computer B has a 3Mps connection the fastest a file could transfer between the 2 computers is going to be 3Mps.

I keep hearing the grumblings of faster internet speeds because of fiber optic lines, but I haven’t seen anything real yet. In our community we still have people a short distance out of town that don’t have a high speed internet connection, or they have to rely on internet through cell phone lines. These connections are always limited and they throttled your speed if you use them too much. 

The bottom line is that until some substantial changes happen to speed up the internet then it really doesn’t matter how fast your new computer or router runs. With more services going to the internet cloud, we are all going to be putting along at the speed of our connections.

Dan LaFollette