Data capacity limited...
Data capacity limited...
For some reason can't wrap my head around it yeah theirs limit on how much information can pass through wire but thinking ceiling is so high that it doesn't matter
It doesn't affect everyday shoppers, although it becomes important in the professional sector.
It's only limited by how much they choose to invest. If ISPs focused more on improving infrastructure rather than raising costs and hoarding profits through lobbying or buying rivals, bandwidth would become a real issue.
The system has certain interface and capacity constraints, varying by destination and resource demand. A typical analogy is a busy road with cars. In theory, an infinitely wide highway could support endless vehicles, but practical limits come from lane spacing and traffic flow.
The speed limit is finite. A link’s capacity depends only on its top velocity. The maximum value really counts. The upper bound is crucial. The ISP must thoughtfully account for this limit when preventing overloads. Enterprise settings—such as offices and data centers—also need to factor in this constraint.
You’re referring to either laying fibre that’s deliberately underused—what most operators do when building backbones or extending fibre networks—or adopting new tech that boosts capacity. The second option is less reliable. The first approach is typical, and when compared to a highway, it’s like adding extra lanes before they’re needed. Overall, the analogy holds well. A highway relies on two aspects: lane count and traffic speed; network transmission mediums work similarly (like twisted pairs in Ethernet, fibre strands, or DOCSIS channels). In reality, the need to widen a highway doesn’t matter much in this comparison.
I guess it depends on the country you are from, I find the highway comparison doesn't work in the UK particularly as we CAN'T overbuild highways because were a tiny island where space is a premium. Plus underutilising fibre in this way would be like building a highway with thousands of lanes when you only need one right now, theres so many orders of magnitude difference in how much bandwidth we need now compared to how much bandwidth those fibres can take. The fact that in the real world its a big deal to widen a highway is IMO vitally important to the analogy, as otherwise people take that analogy too literally and believe the lies by the ISPs about why they "have" to limit peoples speeds, or have bandwidth caps, etc. The last thing you want, especially in the US, is to make it easier for the big telcos to con people into accepting crap service.