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?