Google vice president of engineering Urs Hölzle has warned that unless we update the internet’s underlying protocols, any improvements to network bandwidth will be wasted.
“It’s very clear that the network speed itself will increase,” Hölzle said today during a keynote speech at the internet-infrastructure obsessed Velocity conference in Santa Clara, California. “It’s conceivable that [in the next several years] the average network speed worldwide will grow by a factor of three, from 1.8Mbps to 5.4Mbps. However, if you don’t fix the protocols, we will not be able to exploit that extra bandwidth.”
According to Google’s internal tests, the average webpage is 320KB. With the user’s average bandwidth at 1.8 Mbps, Hölzle says, load times should be around 1.4 seconds. But in reality, according to Google tests, the average load time is closer to 5 seconds. The problem, Hölzle reckons, is not the network. The problem is the protocols – as well as the browser.
I love your site.