

The faster the Internet becomes, the slower it loads pages - doronba
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15523761
Latencies introduced by Advertising, are substantial IMO as well.
======
endergen
I don't want faster as in more throughput, I want faster as in lower latency.
Imagine if we could actually develop software that could depend on the
internet being lower the 1/60th of a second. All the logic we have to do in
games hide latency would go away. We would then be able to just pass back and
forth input streams and have our simulations sync by exchanging them back and
forth. Perhaps 1/120th would be ideal so that both parties feel a sub 1/60th
of a second response time.

~~~
gridspy
Lovely dream. It is unfortunate that it takes 130ms (10x as long as your
dream) for a pulse of light to circumnavigate the world. Even if it was point
to point, without switching or network delays, it would take up to 60ms.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light>

You can't remove the speed of light constraints, no matter how nice it would
be.

~~~
Locke1689
There's a saying: bandwidth is money; latency is physics.

You can always get more bandwidth (more flow per second) through the pipes by
just building more pipes. This isn't difficult, just expensive.

Reducing latency, however, is much harder. Eventually you still have to deal
with a photon moving through fiber and an electron and a circuit.

------
MikeCapone
"The future is beckoning. Netflix has just announced an on-demand video-
streaming service offering full high-definition picture quality (so-called
1080p, which has 1,080 lines in its picture) with 5.1-channel surround sound.
Each stream being watched will require a megabyte a second of bandwidth and a
latency of less than 60ms if it is to deliver crisp, pin-sharp video and
pristine sound."

Latency doesn't matter with video, afaik. This seems inaccurate.

~~~
mortenjorck
Also, Netflix clarified that they aren't doing 1080p this year:
<http://mashable.com/2010/02/08/netflix-1080p/>

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tedunangst
Pretty inaccurate article I'd say. The general premise of "broadband is
faster, but there's more to download" is close to right, and I'll agree that 8
seconds was about how long it took to load web pages back when, but it's a
very rare page (other than HN itself, ironically) that takes more than about 3
seconds to load on even middling DSL.

And I have no idea why streaming video requires 60ms latency.

~~~
_delirium
On my middling DSL (320 kbps symmetric) there's a _lot_ of pages that take
more than 3 seconds to load, especially if you're not using AdBlock. There are
some Flash ads that take 5+ seconds to load just by themselves!

The typical for a large corporate site seems to be 4-6 sec for me. I just
timed cnn.com and yahoo.com both at 5s total load time, and aol.com at 8s (all
in Chrome on Linux).

edit: Found a new winner: foxnews.com consistently takes between 25 and 33
seconds to load.

~~~
doronba
obviously its not a uniform experience, and there are problems with the
article, but i do think it stands to reason that rich content, and in my mind
especially Advertising, grind the experience which I recall was faster in many
cases.

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jcnnghm
People like this shouldn't be writing technical articles.

A 700ms ping would be indicative of severe network problems, especially at
that distance. The author is probably experiencing packet loss. Realistic ping
times across the country are usually 100ms or so. I can ping most major
websites in under 20ms.

DNS can indeed be a bottleneck, but it usually isn't. It's a fairly basic
service, and if it's really a problem it's simple stupid to switch to a free
provider like google.

Streaming video is not dependent on latency, only throughput.

Dark fiber won't necessarily help. The bottleneck is more realistically in the
switching equipment. A single fiber can carry massive amounts of data.

~~~
donaq
Not only that. It's really stupid to use IP addresses instead of domain names
because, guess what, most sites share IPs these days.

------
greenlblue
Funny how the article is talking about slow page loads and the page itself has
a little advertising popup.

~~~
aw3c2
I was going to say that. The web has become pretty fast once I disabled
Javascript and uninstalled Flash. I don't miss anything on everyday browsing
(= killing time or finding interesting things) nor on research. Highly
recommended that you try it.

