system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: In general, what is stopping the internet from being much faster than it is?

How have we gone from 100Mb/s internet speeds with fibre, to 10Gb/s in  South Korea? What was the great improvement that happened there? Surely light travels as fast as light travels, so what made the internet faster and what can make the internet faster?
gpt
So the speed of the Internet is still limited to the speed of light- if someone in Seoul wants to download information from a computer in New York, it will still take 36 ms to get there (meaning the minimum ping of someone playing on a New York game server from South Korea is 72ms- the time it takes to get there and back).

However, we've figured out how to cram more information in the same amount of space. We can transmit the symbols with higher frequency (making each "letter" smaller) and with fiber optic lines, we can transmit data on multiple frequencies simultaneously (stacking the letters on top of each other). As we get better at reading garbled data on the wire, we can increase how much data we send down the line at once.

And keep in mind that as fast as a 10Gb/s Internet connection is, the fastest way to transmit large amounts of data over long distances is still a cargo jet full of hard drives.