Why is internet slow?

Question

If electricity travels at the speed of light, and computers use electricity, why does it take a few seconds to load a webpage thats in china or something?

Answer 1

Because your computer has to process the information it receives and convert it into a form that makes sense (pictures, for example). If things from China are loading more slowly, it has more to do with servers there (and/or the number of servers the data has to go through) than lag because of speed-of-light travel time.

Answer 2

Electricity doesn't travel at the speed of light. Most long-distance data transmission uses fiber optics, where the signal travels at the speed of light IN THAT MEDIUM, which is less than the speed of light in a vacuum.

A signal travelling to the opposite side of the earth travels about 12,000 miles. At the speed of light, that's around 7 milliseconds. But a signal won't go nearly that far, even in the best optical fiber, so at the very least, it needs to be detected, converted to an electrical signal, amplified, and retransmitted optically.

Nodes of the Internet are managed by routers, which assemble the serial transmission of a packet of data into the router's memory. The router needs to figure out where to send it next on the way to its destination. Once the next link is decided, your packet waits its turn to use that link. Then, it's transmitted, one bit at a time, to the next router. The Unix traceroute command will show you the series of routers your packet takes to reach its destination. At the destination, the acknowledgement of your packet works its way back to you, usually by a different path. A web page transmited using the HTTP protocol usually takes hundreds of packets. The amazement is that it works at all, not that it takes a few seconds.

Once the HTTP request reaches the server, the server needs to interpret it and find the HTML source files needed to handle it. Those are usually on magnetic disk, so finding them and reading them takes time. That search doesn't even start until your HTTP request reaches the top of the server's queue of requests.

Answer 3

Dear Alex:

The answer is simple! Recall Einstein's theory of General Relativity, which states that e=mc^2, e standing for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light. In other words, as something approaches the speed of light, its mass increases enormously. Therefore, we can deduce that since the electricity in your computer is going at light speed to deliver the internet, it is also becoming very heavy (which is also why it hurts your eyes to look at the sun). And with so many computers using the internet at once, all that heavy electricity tends to clog down the servers.

-Dr. Science

Answer 4

It's like any traffic congestion....you get a bottle-neck, or restriction in the flow of data in direct proportion to the numbers involved...try the net when the world's asleep and it may be too quick for you...

Answer 5

lol..good question but i think it depends how fast it goes on how many ppl are online..

Answer 6

ya know what you mean