Everyone loves to blame the Internet and talk about how slow it's getting. In particular, people who manage webservers love to tell you that the reason they're web is slow is because "the Internet is overloaded".
While parts of the Internet can become overloaded, I've generally found that the Internet is generally not the problem. The problem is:
The problem is usually not the Internet backbone itself.
I've found that the best way to test this and to prove it to other people is to use the AltaVista search engine. The AltaVista webserver lives somewhere in the USA and is so incredibly fast that it usually responds within three to five seconds. It seems to do this almost all the time. The fact that it can do this indicates that (at least for text and small image transfers) the Internet has more than enough bandwidth to transfer a typical web page within a few seconds of it being requested. If the Internet backbone can deliver AltaVista pages in a hurry, there would seem to be no reason why it can't deliver pages from other servers quickly too. The obvious conclusion is that it's the servers that are slow, not the Internet.
Try it! Click on the AltaVista link below and count how long it takes to come up.
If (for example) you're in England and someone down the road says
that their web is slow "because the Internet is overloaded",
ask them to explain why you can retrieve text and (some) graphics from
AltaVista in the USA in five seconds flat.
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