Does everything have to go through ISP servers/backbone and street cabinets?

[tehx]

Hi. Just wondering. Say if I am downloading or uploading files from my organisations servers which are located just down the road from my house. I should have good connection speed right? Because the connection is being made directly via the cable which runs down my road to the school. Or is this the case? Even if I am doing p2p file tranfers to servers which are on the same street as me does the connection have to go up all the way to where my isps servers are and then to my organisations isp sevrers? which could mean the connection goes all around the country instead of just down the road. Just curious thanks.

[Lurick]

It usually goes to the ISP's backbone or to a local hub, whichever is first, and then is routed back to where it needs to go depending on the destination.

[tehx]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

It usually goes to the ISP's backbone or to a local hub, whichever is first, and then is routed back to where it needs to go depending on the destination.

So I do not have a direct connection to my organisation? So my connection could be routed all around the country depending on the location of the ISP's servers before it reaches my organisation even though it is on the same street as me?

[Lurick]

Just now, Assassinguy2623 said:

So I do not have a direct connection to my organisation? So my connection could be routed all around the country depending on the location of the ISP's servers before it reaches my organisation even though it is on the same street as me?

Yah basically. The cabinets don't have much, if any, logical switching or routing capabilities so it needs to get somewhere that can properly route the packets to their destination which is usually the local hub at best.

[tehx]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

Yah basically. The cabinets don't have much, if any, logical switching or routing capabilities so it needs to get somewhere that can properly route the packets to their destination which is usually the local hub at best.

Ah okay intresting. So even if the servers you are trying to download from are right next to you if my ISP's sevrers/localhub aren't right next to me and is further away from me than the servers I am trying to download from it is going to be 'bottlenecking' the connection in a sense.

[raxbg]

It all depends on how the network, that your ISP is providing, is set up. It also depends on whether you have to connect to a machine on entirely different network. If the servers, that you are trying to download from, are on the same network as you, then you will have very little bottlenecking potentially coming from devices like routers or switches on that network. But you will always have that, even in a home network, unless you run a cable between the two computers directly. Going out of the local network, you will typically have to go through routers controlled by your ISP, where they can start throttling your speeds.

[Windows7ge]

Unless you paid for a private WAN connection which would physically connect you directly to your organization without going though your ISP then all your other connections are going though your ISP and you're limited by the plan you're paying for. There's also additional latency by DNS lookup and every network hop that you have to go through before you reach your organization.

 

Not to mention using the internet your connection doesn't take the same route each time you connect. It's subject to change based on bandwidth availability. This means some days it may feel fast and other days it may feel slow.

 

Edit:

If you want you can test how many hops are between you and your organization using both the ping and tracert commands.

Ping will test responsiveness. This show be quite low if you're geographically close to your organization

Tracert will say how many network hops are between you and your organization. The less there are the more likely you'll hold a fast stable connection.

 

Regardless of the results you'll still only see speeds as high as you're paying for from your ISP. Particularly based on your upload speeds which are often much slower than download speeds.