by Charles Miller

Last week I was trying my best to make a point to clarify the need, or lack thereof, for paying extra to obtain higher broadband internet connection speeds. What I stated then was that just because you pay extra for 300 or 600 Megabits Per Second (Mbps) or higher internet speeds at your house, that does not mean that the web sites to which you connect will serve data to you at such high speeds. I struggled to find a good example everyone could understand, then one dropped right into my lap.

This happened when I was on the phone talking to someone about a website that offers to play online chess games, played against the computer or played against another visitor logged onto the site. Right there at the bottom of the web page it said "85,346 players, 36,840 games in play." I already knew that when anyone logs onto any popular website such as the New York Times, they are not the only person logging in. Many people are connected to The Times at the same time, many reading the same articles, but there is no indicator of how many visitors that could be. In contrast, the chess website has a live counter that shows how many tens of thousands of visitors are looking at the website and how many games of chess are currently in active play.

This was the example I had been looking for. In order to accommodate the tens of thousands of visitors connecting simultaneously to the chess website, each individual visitor could not be allowed to connect using their full 200, 400, or 600 Mbps they might have available to them at their homes. If the website did that it would overwhelm their server’s available bandwidth. Imagine if you visited that website and it said "Welcome, you are 85,347th in line, please wait your turn." Obviously that would never work! New visitors would leave the site never to return.

What the webmasters and network engineers did instead was to make a calculation as to how much bandwidth was really required for the animated graphics, videos, etc. to be accessed by a single visitor, then set a limit on how much data would be served to each person, making sure that every visitor had enough speed allocated to them but not more than they needed to play a game of chess or watch one of the instructional videos. Even though the visitor might be connecting from their home internet with a broadband connection speed of hundreds of megabits per second, the fact of the matter is that to play a game of online chess all the speed that is really needed for that activity is far less than one Mbps, so that is how much data the web server makes available to each individual visitor.

By the way, the website to which I refer in this column is Lichess.org which is a free, no-ads, open source chess server powered by volunteers and donations. It is one of the most popular chess websites in the world, on which visitors users play more than five million games every day. Sometimes when trying to play a game against the computer it will say it is "not accepting any more challenges at this time" and to try again later. That is not because your internet connection at your house is too slow, it is because there are already so many thousands of other people playing that the server cannot accommodate any more because its capacity, not yours, has been reached. No matter how much more speed you pay for on your end, that would not have any impact on this situation.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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