A6 Labs

Packets have a short life (although its all a matter of perspective really), in general a packet that lasts much more than a few tens of  milliseconds is doing well. Some packets have been known to live for as long as 700ms and travel into space but in generally most exist for a far shorter period of time and never make it out of the ground. Despite their short lifetime they have an important purpose without which the Internet would cease to exist. They carry the messages we send to friends, orders we send to online shops, directions to help us through traffic, films, weather, everything! What are these packets? Well really they're more of a concept than a substantial physical being, manifesting as strings of electrons or photons but little more. Their purpose, to convey little messages across the Internet. Created by many things, computers, phones, TV's anything that needs to talk to anything else over a network they come into being at the push of a button and cease to exist o...

In a previous blog,  How much data does the UK consume in a second , we eluded to the fact that although a broadband connection is sold as X megabits per second achieving this will depend on what else is happening on the network at the time. The Internet works in much the same way as the household mains water system. Growing up I remember switching on all the taps in the house for the amusement of the one highest and furthest from the source drying up (poking cowpats with a stick was another game to while away the hours!). The point is that the ability to deliver the advertised data-rate (think water pressure) depends on the competition for the network or contention to use the correct term. Another analogy is that of cars using a road. When traffic is light they can all use the road simultaneously and drive at the speed limit. Come rush-hour this starts to break down because to many cars are trying to use the same road simultaneously. Eventually they all get from A to B but it take...

Whilst sat browsing the Internet, streaming a catch up show on the TV, I wondered, if you add up all the ones and zeros being consumed and produced by every Internet connection in the country, what number does that come to? Ofcom (the UK telecoms regulator) reports that in 2020 the average speed of a broadband connection in the UK was 80.2Mb/s. Also reported was the total number of broadband connections at 27.49 million. So therefor the speed of the UK Internet is 27.49 million multiplied by 80.2Mb/s right? Well that sum comes out at 2,204,698,000,000,000 bits/s or 2,205 Terabits/second or 'a lot' in simple terms. In truth the reality is a little more complicated. In the same way that the roads aren't designed for everyone who owns a car to travel at the same time the Internet isn't factored to allow everyone to use their Internet connection at its maximum speed all of the time (see a future blog on 'Contention Ratio'). Also reported is that the average data usa...

Simply put, a million million. Well if you're British its a million million million but being somewhat out numbered by the rest of the world and with a nod to pragmatism we'll stick to the international definition. Long strings of zero's don't really allow most of us to comprehend the true scale of this number (one with 12 zero's after it). Perhaps those who work in Astrophysics or nanotechnology will have a good comprehension but to most of us we need a contextualisation. Finding a context that conveys the magnitude of this number is tricky. For example the number of Homo-sapiens  to have ever existed in a meagre 110 billion, just 11% of a trillion. Obvious analogies such as piles of coins are readily available through Internet searches but are still tricky to conceive.  Think  Brewster's Millions , that was only $300million, 0.03% of the figure we're talking about and look how hard that was for Monty to get rid of! As a human analogy, workers building road...