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No, Your WiFi Is Not Slow Today
What’s really happening when your Internet connectivity slows down
It’s a reflection of our general lack of knowledge regarding how things work that one of the most common complaints today is “my wifi is slow today.” In fact, your wifi is probably never, ever, slow. The problem is actually elsewhere, and in order to understand what’s happening, a short high-level sketch is required of how Internet connectivity works.
First of all, what is the Internet? Is it all those web pages we connect to? Is it some mysterious alien technology recovered from Area 51? What’s going on when we click on a URL or a hyperlink?
At its most basic, the Internet is a series of wires (usually fiber optic backbones these days, with copper from the curb to the home in many countries) that connect two or more computers together via a series of boxes called routers. A signal from your computer is passed to a router that looks up the destination in a huge database (called a Domain Name Server) and sends your signal on its way. Your signal, in turn, is bundled into packets, each one of which has a header (information about where it has come from and where it is going, and what other packets it’s connected with) and a body (information content, such as the letters of a word or some pixels of a photograph).
