Why the internet connexions don't go as fast as the electricity ?

Question

Yes, why is that so slow, knowing that it's all only transported by electricity, why doesn'it go as fast ?

Answer 1

The points made by the previous responders are reasonable. In the context of communication, speed more often means bits per unit time, rather than physical speed which is distance per unit time. Electricity does travel very fast in the *latter sense*, close to the speed of light - but what is it about an electrical circuit which limits the number of bits which can be transmitted per second?

Suppose you tried to send information by switching on and off the power to an electric fan being observed by someone else. It takes five or ten seconds for the fan to slow down or regain normal speed after it's been switched off or on, so it would be impossible to communicate much more than 3 or 4 bits per minute reliably using such a system. If you tried to do it faster there would be no change observable at the other end.

There's a similar limitation for any pair of copper wires. If L is the inductance and R the resistance, it takes a time roughly t ~ L/R for the current to drop at one end when the voltage has been switched off at the other end. The magnetic field surrounding the wires keeps the current going just like the momentum of the fan blades.

There's nothing much that can be done about this except for changing the structure of the cable. For example the pair of copper wires can be replaced by a coaxial cable in which one conductor forms a cylinder surrounding the other. The magnetic fields produced by the two currents tend to cancel which substantially reduces the inductance L, allowing a much faster (bits/second) speed.

When most of the telephone network was implemented there was no reason to use coax since a pair of copper wires works fine for voice (audio frequencies = roughly 10K-100K bit/sec), although these will probably be upgraded if the phone companies are allowed to compete with the cable companies.

Fiber optic cable also has a very high bandwidth (bits/second) ... but your question is specifically about electricity.

Answer 2

Well, because often the signal doesn't go straight to your destination and back again. Sometimes the signal takes a circuitous trip thhrough various routers that may actually increase the physical distance between your computer and the destination. It's similar in some ways to television programs that are aired by satellite. Say Wolf Blitzer is televising from Washington. D.C. on CNN and you live in Alexandria, Virginia. Even though the distance between Washington and Alexandria is miniscule, the signal actually has to travel all the way up into space and back down again to your local satellite affiliate, so in effect it may make a huge trip for a very short geographic distance. Normally, the routers are designed such that the shortest possible trip is made (by calculation) so that the signal arrives fast, but it doesn't guarantee a "direct" route.

Also, the speed depends upon the bandwidth. A good analogy here is to imagine two pipes, one narrow and one wide. A narrow pipe lets a smaller quantity of water to pass through than a wide one. Similarly, a connection with greater bandwidth lets more information pass in each unit of time, so you get it faster.

Answer 3

There are many areas in which things can get slowed down. For example accessing the harddisk for information. That is pretty much mechanical speed. Even assessing stuff from RAM will take time.

Further, the Internet is based on the Internet Protocol (IP) which uses packetized transmission. This has the advantage of accommodating many data, voice & video transmission to many different destinations. However, the route that is taken by the packets of the same information may varies. On arrival, the packets are then reassembled together again to obtain the original message. If any error occurs along the way, a retransmission request is sent to get the information sent again.

Internet Protocol is based on best effort. This makes it very flexible but it has the disadvantage that things can get lost.

Imagine that we use the Internet Protocol on all humans in the world. Assume everyone human on planet Earth has a unique id and the protocol is that any message you receive with your id on it, you keep. Any thing else, you pass it to your neighbour. If you are overload, you just discard the messages. The rules are very simple and theoretically, given sufficient time, the message will get to the destination address.

Answer 4

Once a bit is headed your way, it moves pretty quickly, even if it takes a somewhat roundabout route. The main things that can slow down your browsing are bandwidth and server response.

Bandwidth is the number of bits per second that your ISP will deliver to you. If you have a dialup connection, that will be no more than 56k. DSL, cable, and dedicated lines can offer speeds of many megabits. But whatever it is, there's a limit to it. Your ISP has only so much total bandwidth available, so it rations it out. You want more, you pay more.

Anything you want to see on the internet is stored on a server somewhere. The server has to copy that information from a hard drive to the internet, and that takes time. It might also have to do some data processing to assemble the information that you want, and that takes time. Usually, not very much time, but if many requests come in at once, you may have to wait a few seconds for the server to send the information to you.

Answer 5

They do go as fast as electricity. It's just, "as fast as electricity" is a pretty meaningless term. Switching your light on or off is 1 bit of data. Imagine you sent a signal, by switching your light on and off every second to represent a 1 or a 0. Hard to keep up? Your net connection is basically doing this, only much, much faster.

Answer 6

It does go as fast as electricity, it is electricity.

The time lag is the result of the encoding, decoding and frequency restrictions. But, the current is moving at the same rate as any other current (roughly the speed of light).

Answer 7

because it is so going to the main frame which is a big unit to collect all the,,,,,,,why don't you ask a simple question?