The myth of fibre optic broadband

I have a fibre optic broadband internet connection and connect to the internet at an amazing 30Mbit/s, so why is the web so slow?

Let's do a few calculations. If you divide the connection speed in Mbit by 10, you get roughly the speed at which you can download data from the internet in Mb. This means that I should be able to download at 3Mb/sec. This is about right and when downloading big files from the internet they are really fast and 3Mb/s download speeds are definitely possible. It's great for grabbing Linux distros and other big files.

Web pages are much smaller and even a large one might only be 300k. That means a web page should download in one tenth of a second. I have the bandwidth. However, instead of web pages displaying in the blink of an eye, they take 3, 4, 5 seconds or sometimes even longer. Why? In five seconds I should be able to download 15Mb, so why can't I get a tiny web page to display?

The reason is that a web page is composed of many small files. It takes a certain amount of time for the computer and the remote web server to establish a connection and start sending data. With one big file to download the computer only has to make one connection and so the time is insignificant compared to the total time to download the data. With a small file the time to make a connection and start a data transfer is large compared to the time taken to download the data. With lots of small files to download as is the case with a web page, there are lots of delays as each connection is established. This makes web pages slow to load.

Web servers often have multiple visitors all viewing web pages, so it has to make lots of connections with lots of computers and this makes it slow. It's much easier to establish one connection and send one big file.

I went from a 3Mb/s ordinary broadband connection to a 30Mbit/s fibre optic connection. That's 10 times faster, but browsing the web is perhaps just twice as fast. If I could get a 300Mbit/s connection it is likely that I'd still only be able to browse the web twice as fast as my 30Mb/s connection.

A super fast internet connection is really only useful if you download big files or have lots of people sharing it. It doesn't make the web a whole lot faster. It's better, but not by as much as you might expect.