How large is the internet?

March 27th, 2009 19:11 by ogrim

Matilde asks me all the time how large the internet is. I keep telling her it’s not about the size, rather about traffic and people connected. Anyone with a connection to the internet, can easily expand the size by hosting their own webserver, or any other service. I am personally responsible for several gigabytes of the internets size. But that is not important. It is the amount of traffic my content is generating, and the number of people downloading it, that is interesting.

In order to put some internet sense in her, I am going to give her this book when I meet her later today. It is called “Hva er Internett?” and is written in Norwegian by internet guru Gisle Hannemyr. I read it myself, and it is very informative about the more technical parts of the internet, without being very technical at all. The book is for those who use the internet on a daily basis, but don’t know much about the finer details. It’s not going to teach you how to use email, it’s not that basic.

Another fun-fact is that speed also is irrelevant on the internet. Electrons move the same speed trough copper cables today, as they did back in 1995. There is difference in speed with different technologies, such as fiber optic cables, and wireless networks, but even that is not the most important stuff. Bandwith is the measurement used for how much data you can move trough a network, often measured in kilobits per second (kbps). We perceive this as speed, since higher bandwith allows you to download files faster. Still, it is not speed.

Imagine two people standing on opposite sides of a lake. They both know morse code, and one of them has a flashlight. He is communicating with the other person, sending morse code with his flashlight. The other person is standing on the opposite side of the lake, looking at the flashlight in the middle of the night. Depending on his skills, he might be able to understand only a certain amount of morse code per second. This is not the speed of the communication, it is the bandwith. The morse is transmitted with light, which moves at a constant speed. What we might think of as speed, is realy bandwith, and is how much morse code that can be understood per second.

The next time someone brag about their fast internet connection, you can tell them that your own connection is just as fast. What may differ, is the bandwith.