This is the first in a series of posts looking at what makes the web slow and what to do about it.
Suppose you needed to transfer 1TB of data (perhaps your home movie collection) from San Francisco to London. What would be the fastest route? Put the disk on British Airways flight 286 at SFO, or transfer it across the Internet using a 100 Mbps connection?
Surprisingly, the answer is the former not the latter. If you had a perfect 100 Mbps Internet connection and could fill it completely with data the transfer would take 22 hours 13 minutes. British Airways make the flight in under 10 hours.
But even with a 100 Mbps Internet connection you’re unlikely to get 100 Mbps of transfer speed between San Francisco and London. The details of the TCP protocol used on the Internet and the speed of light collude to make the effective transfer speed much lower.
To really understand the speed of an Internet connection, be it transferring 1TB of data or downloading a web page, there are two values that you need to know: the bandwidth and the latency.
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