system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does the number of people using the internet still have an impact?

I remember back in the day when you couldn't get online simply because too many people were using the internet. Does this still occur today? And why/why not?

What made me think of this is with the current pandemic there are way more people at home using streaming services etc, just interested to see if this will cause difficulties like back in the dark days of dial up.
gpt
Not exactly. You couldn’t get online in the past because your ISP had a finite number of phone lines able to connect with your modem. That’s not typically going to be the case today, since the ISPs provision hardware for always on connections, versus adhoc connections from modems. That said, there’s a big difference between always on connections using a few Kbps continuously and those same number suddenly streaming Mbps. Some areas have been seeing issues more than others. A lot of folks are discovering that cable companies (and fiber to a degree) have shared lines that are overprovisioned (more customers than it can handle at a time). This results in degraded quality, higher latency, and generally not getting the max bandwidth you’re paying for. Overall, though, the Internet has been handling things quite well. Mostly because people working from home or gaming takes WAY less bandwidth than streaming Netflix, Hulu, YTTV, Prime Video, etc. which everyone has been doing every evening for a while.