The lifespan of the Internet
The Internet has just celebrated its twentieth birthday.
A mere two decades on, it has been embraced by the world and has become as essential to society as the telephone or the printing press.
My own intoduction to the Internet came about somewhere in the early nineties.
In those days, web pages were static and graphics tended to be used for illustration rather than decoration. Multimedia was virtually unheard of, as speeds tended to be low. My corporate connection to the Internet backbone was a dedicated 256K line which served 2,000 staff.
My home connection for many years was a 56K dialup which served me very well. Then broadband arrived and my connection jumped to a (relatively) massive 3M.
My connection is still 3M and is remarkably constant. I have few contention issues and am pretty much guaranteed maximum speeds at all times.
I have noticed lately though, that I am experiencing more of the problems I used to be familiar with in my dialup days. I get page load errors, sites that are very slow to load and general timeout errors.
Has the Internet reached capacity? Has YouTube, media streaming and the sheer volume of information saturated the bandwidth?
Is it just me, or has anyone else experienced this?
all i really know about internet speed is that my supposed to be “lightening fast” cable connection is only a bit faster than dial-up was… or maybe i’ve had it so long I just don’t remember dial-up…oh, who the hell am i kidding…who can forget dial-up and waiting hours and hours for a page to load if it ever did and forget about downloading. in answer to your question, i believe we have out bandwidth’d ourselves 🙂 yes, i know i should not be talking at this hour of the morning…
Who could forget dialup? 😐
I have been on for a while this morning and I have lost count of the timeout errors I have had. It seems to run in bursts, but most of the time it is very slooooow.
My first foray onto the internet was back in 1992 on a 14.4k modem! When it was changed a couple of years later for a 33.6k modem it was like a quantum leap. When broadband first became available here it was 512k then upgraded to 2Mb, then I changed to 4Mb business which was upgraded again last year to 7.6Mb.
Even now that seems a bit slow. But I do have a consistent connection. I use a proxy server to cache a lot of static content as I tend to visit the same sites regularly and that reduces my downloads by a whopping 10%.
I’ve noticed some sites seem to be struggling to meet demand. Most recently the Indo seems to be on it’s knees a lot of the time.
I have found the whole thing to be very frustrating lately, Robert. The Irish Times, the Indo, even Google take ages and then come up with a blank screen. In a lot of cases, I’m getting pages minus the CSS which makes for very interesting formatting! I think it is nearly time to go back to pen and paper?
Well with this recession some people are harping back to the “good old days” so maybe ISP’s are dropping speeds in line with the dial up modems of the good old days?
sorry i had to come back over here to see wtf is going on. my notices are going to my hotmail (junk) box…now i see. when i published that comment i didn’t change it…sorry for the interruption 🙂
shoot and still i didn’t change it…now that should do it… geez why can’t i wake up this morning…
Robert: D’you think it is a recessionary cut? Do ISP speeds follow the ISEQ index? Are we experiencing a 70% downturn?
Prin: You just carry on with whatever you are doing. You are playing a blinder.
I’ve got superfast internet at work but have the same time out or page load errors. Someone told me it’s the servers that are reaching capacity. Sometimes on people’s blogs, it looks as if I’m chiming in from Canberra or Port Moresby! I live in Sydney!
I blame people who are downloading movies/porn/torrents etc. who really should have their own contention-free line.
It seems dependent of time of day and what route the connection is taking. As I pointed out in a recent post, I Skype with you no problem, but always have trouble on Skype with a business associate in Ohio, who is far from me but not as far as you are. Distance seems to make little difference. I can’t say it’s his machine, because he runs a top of the line outfit. Must be something in the route then. Curious.
Baino: Before our K8 moved she used to alternate between Ireland and the UK! Of course here we think 3M is super fast! 😐
TheChrisD: Leave Grandad out of it please.
RhodesTer: Funnily enough, I was trying a Skype call to a friend in the next county last night. I say ‘trying’ because the damn thing kept failing, and that was only over a distance of about 20 miles.
Ok ok I won’t go on about my 20M internet connection for $55 a month or the fact I can d/l a 17G torrent in under 40 minutes.
My first internet connection was a 9600 baud modem and the upgrade to 14.4K was HUGE. It was the mid 90’s when we got a corporate wide ATM connection and that was SCREAMING fast. It was probably around 1M throughput. It seems to me that places with an upgraded infrastructure/backbone has higher speeds and less problems. My ISP is Verizon who were formerly Bell of Pa who were formerly Bell Telephone ie The Phone Company. When I do a tracert to any site it hops through Verizons backbone server farms in Pa and Va before going out to the rest of net. This is where I find speeds slow down. So call your ISP and tell them to get with the program.
I’m a relative late comer to the Internets. Lottie set me up with my first email address about 8 years ago, but i only really starting surfing about 2 years ago and it’s only in this last year that I actually understand any of the inner workings. It’s all so very fascinating – I wish I had been involved years ago.
20 years old? Amazing, when you consider how vital (yes, vital) it is today.
I’ve never liked sites Crammed full of Flash and Java scripts. Beats me why any site owner that’s working toward drawing visitors to their sites would do that in the first place. Most people who surf the WWW suffer from an “Atlantic City”/”Las Vegas” state of mind.
In my experience however, it’s not so much the amount of bandwidth that’s available to you at home, it’s that you’re still at the mercy of the sever(s) your trying to hookup to and route you take to get there. Not much you can do about that but…
One thing is that most modern day browsers come with DNS pre-fetching enabled by default which many times can be more of a liability than an asset depending on where your trying to surf to. I finally just turned it off completely and I’ve had very few problems with getting to where I want to go.
Also, Firefox extensions like Faster Fox can as easily cause all those problems you stated rather than speed up your surfing if you have the thing cranked wide open.
One last thing that often causes server timeouts and slow loading sites is enabling network http pipelining in a browser and cranking up the number of channels allowed to connect to any given server at one time. Do this and all of a sudden servers are timing out and rejecting your requests left and right.
For myself, I keep DNS pre-fetching disabled (in Chrome, not in Firefox) and network http pipelining disabled and I rarely have any problem getting anywhere I wish to go and that’s on low end 768k DSL.
Even the Irish Times. 😉
Why oh why do I always forget to check that $$##!! box on this site?
at least you haven’t done what i did kirk and comment with the wrong email box then come over here to try to fix it by changing the email address but forgetting to check the box and then having to come back over here to check the box with the right email address …so now i have two notifications…one in each box 🙂
Hi prin – No, I haven’t done that yet but I wouldn’t put it past me to do so sometime in the near future (now where’s that check box?!)
🙂 we could just blame it on that other fellow…
Blame it on who???
you didn’t expect me to admit i had a “senior moment” (or hour) did you?