Does internet congestion happen less often now?

justaquestion

HI,


Not so many years ago congestion and slow speeds were a common problem and reading articles at the time forecast that they could only get worse as more people went on to streaming services, it really looked like a lot of doom and gloom waiting to happen.


So just wondering why hasn't it, ok speeds were slow for me in evenings with standard broadband, but since switching to fibre overall usually good consistent speeds and not a lot of outages.


So just wondering why the seemingly forecast congestion hasn't happened even with fibre broadband.?

dealer_wins

I think all the congestion has moved over to mobile networks. EE and 3 are atrocious in the evenings and at weekends.

JJ_Egan

More and more infrastucture upgrades.
BT FTTP 300 meg ++ is rolling out .

Neil_Jones

Congestion is still always a possibility, its just the conditions have changed.

If you consider an internet connection to be a pipe, you have the providers with really big pipes, the connections to them are smaller pipes and then you have the connection from home to exchange as smaller pipes still. Your internet traffic is like "water" flowing down these pipes.

In the old days the "pipe" from the exchange to the provider was only a finite size and what used to happen was everybody tried to connect down a pipe that was too small, so much like traffic that's backed up on a roundabout because its too small for the amount of traffic it has to carry.

In a fibre world the technology is different (as the name suggests, fibre connections from exchange onwards and then copper to the house in a FTTC configuration) and the "pipes" are fatter at all parts of the system.

Remember that ADSL broadband and the later fibre technologies had to be "tacked on" to the phone lines as it were because the entire phone operation was only ever designed for voice calls - it dates from the 1940s and it was significantly cheaper to effectively bodge it (even though its not a bodge as such) for broadband in the 1990s and 2000s because voice calls was the majority usage at the time.

Geodark

Just to clarify, are you meaning contention or congestion?

DoaM

Whilst congestion and contention aren't exactly the same, people tend to use the terms interchangeably as the impact is basically the same.

https://www.broadbandcompared.co.uk/guides/what-is-contention-ratio

AndyPix

Geodark wrote: »

Just to clarify, are you meaning contention or congestion?

Different things ..
Contention can be the cause of congestion