Due to the recent APCN2 undersea cable outage, I read quite a bit of complaints from subscribers and thought I should write a little educational entry on how the Internet works.
What are you really paying for?
When you buy a connection to your ISP, you are merely buying the link from your home/office to your ISP. Theoretically speaking, ADSL users should have the first advantage over Cable Modem users as the Cable Modem sits on a shared topology.
The ugly truth about the bandwidth test.
However, this isn’t much of a concern as your nearby POP (Point of Presence) would usually have enough bandwidth to take care of this so subscribers always get near maximum bandwidth up to this point; StarHub users should be familiar with the annoying Bandwidth Test that always seem to report excellent bandwidth. If it doesn’t, your physical line might be faulty.
Going international.
Beyond that, it gets a little more complicated. Data from a subscriber travel through some tens of kilometers of fiber optic cables, then to some routers and switches within your ISP. When it reaches the border – the part of the ISP that connects to the “outside world” (other ISPs, known as peers), the data goes in all directions, e.g. if the subscriber requests a site in China, it might go through Hong Kong, then to China.
Well, that’s for data heading out. It’s a different story when the data returns from China.
