It’s staggering when you think of how far internet access and connections have evolved in their short 45 year history. An infographic released by MCS Test Equipment illustrates its journey perfectly from its infancy through to the modern day and age of ultra-fast broadband that we live in now. It all began in 1969 when the Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as ARPANET was established by the US Department of Defense as a support network for its research labs and universities.
Back then though it would have taken 6 to 7 days to download a film, at a speed of 50 kilobytes per second. Nowadays, with the fibre optic connections we have it can take as little as a minute, at a speed of 300 megabytes per second.
As impressive as those numbers are, it’s even more fascinating to think that in 1997 when Wi-Fi was first introduced only 2% of the world’s population had internet access; but in 17 years that number has increased to 40%.
If anyone was unsure whether the bold claims of lightning fast, films downloaded in seconds were hot air; just looking at this infographic would be enough to show that anything is possible.