Yeeeeees, but ...

Yes, that's right, but even if you are only downloading something, you're still causing a little upstream traffic, because of the way computers talk to each other.

Imagine if you had two hoses for your internet, and one brought stuff in, and the other sent stuff out. If you asked your computer to download a big file (a film or whatever) your "in" hose would get very busy. But then, after a while, if you stood on the "out" house, eventually the "in" hose would stop too - because your computer isn't able to send acknowledgements that it's getting data.

The way I understand satellite broadband to work is the "in" hose is quite big and thick, but the "out" hose is comparatively narrow.

I've never explained TCP/IP with a garden hose analogy before, but I quite like it.

Posted By: Arizona Bay, Jul 3, 14:57:52