der getting out the fly spray for that fly, but you'll just finish typing first. Flies are irritating, but they aren't THAT irritating. Now let's say instead of one fly - there were 70 million. You can't even get to the fly spray because they are crawling over every surface. Even if you did spray and kill them all, they would pile up to your chin in a dead heap on the floor. And as soon as they died a new one would come take their place anyway. Now they become a real problem. It's not thThe online world is getting larger, and as the demand grows, so do the demands on the infrastructure. People want more, they want it faster and they want it now! So how's your internet connection running? is it faster or slower than this time last year? In most cases it will have slowed down, maybe just a little. And when you look at the figures, that isn't really surprising.

One of the reasons things are slowing up a little is that every man, his dog and sister are involved in internet file sharing. Simply speaking - masses of information is exchanging hands, often in the form of music or videos, which are very large. If you think of the major internet connections as a pipe and the information as the water - only so much water can flow through any single point of the pipe at one time. It's a lot - but it is finite, and that means if more than that limit is trying to flow through the pipe, things start to backup behind it. So when we are talking about speed, the less information is sharing the same pipeline as you, the faster things are going to run. This is why new internet service providers often start up with a very quick service, but their connection speeds slow down as more and more customers join.

One form of information flowing through the pipeline is spam email. Now compared to a video these messages are tiny, but there's also an awful lot of them. A high proportion of spam emails contain pictures, which again, while smaller than videos and music, take up space and bandwidth.

So a spam message will have a small effect on the flow of traffic and overall internet speeds right? Well yes, but the problem with spam, as we know is they don't come one at a time, and they use whatever method necessary to get mail through. Let's try an analogy. There's a fly in your house. It buzzes around and annoys you a little by landing on your arm while you are trying to type informative and interesting articles. It's annoying, and you consider getting out the fly spray for that fly, but you'll just finish typing first. Flies are irritating, but they aren't THAT irritating. Now let's say instead of one fly - there were 70 million. You can't even get to the fly spray because they are crawling over every surface. Even if you did spray and kill them all, they would pile up to your chin in a dead heap on the floor. And as soon as they died a new one would come take their place anyway. Now they become a real problem. It's not the

net file sharing. Simply speaking - masses of information is exchanging hands, often in the form of music or videos, which are very large. If you think of the major internet connections as a pipe and the information as the water - only so much water can flow through any single point of the pipe at one time. It's a lot - but it is finite, and that means if more than that limit is trying to flow through the pipe, things start to backup behind it. So when we are talking about speed, the less information is sharing the same pipeline as you, the faster things are going to run. This is why new internet service providers often start up with a very quick service, but their connection speeds slow down as more and more customers join.

One form of information flowing through the pipeline is spam email. Now compared to a video these messages are tiny, but there's also an awful lot of them. A high proportion of spam emails contain pictures, which again, while smaller than videos and music, take up space and bandwidth.

So a spam message will have a small effect on the flow of traffic and overall internet speeds right? Well yes, but the problem with spam, as we know is they don't come one at a time, and they use whatever method necessary to get mail through. Let's try an analogy. There's a fly in your house. It buzzes around and annoys you a little by landing on your arm while you are trying to type informative and interesting articles. It's annoying, and you consider getting out the fly spray for that fly, but you'll just finish typing first. Flies are irritating, but they aren't THAT irritating. Now let's say instead of one fly - there were 70 million. You can't even get to the fly spray because they are crawling over every surface. Even if you did spray and kill them all, they would pile up to your chin in a dead heap on the floor. And as soon as they died a new one would come take their place anyway. Now they become a real problem. It's not th

nformation is sharing the same pipeline as you, the faster things are going to run. This is why new internet service providers often start up with a very quick service, but their connection speeds slow down as more and more customers join.

One form of information flowing through the pipeline is spam email. Now compared to a video these messages are tiny, but there's also an awful lot of them. A high proportion of spam emails contain pictures, which again, while smaller than videos and music, take up space and bandwidth.

So a spam message will have a small effect on the flow of traffic and overall internet speeds right? Well yes, but the problem with spam, as we know is they don't come one at a time, and they use whatever method necessary to get mail through. Let's try an analogy. There's a fly in your house. It buzzes around and annoys you a little by landing on your arm while you are trying to type informative and interesting articles. It's annoying, and you consider getting out the fly spray for that fly, but you'll just finish typing first. Flies are irritating, but they aren't THAT irritating. Now let's say instead of one fly - there were 70 million. You can't even get to the fly spray because they are crawling over every surface. Even if you did spray and kill them all, they would pile up to your chin in a dead heap on the floor. And as soon as they died a new one would come take their place anyway. Now they become a real problem. It's not th

usic, take up space and bandwidth.

So a spam message will have a small effect on the flow of traffic and overall internet speeds right? Well yes, but the problem with spam, as we know is they don't come one at a time, and they use whatever method necessary to get mail through. Let's try an analogy. There's a fly in your house. It buzzes around and annoys you a little by landing on your arm while you are trying to type informative and interesting articles. It's annoying, and you consider getting out the fly spray for that fly, but you'll just finish typing first. Flies are irritating, but they aren't THAT irritating. Now let's say instead of one fly - there were 70 million. You can't even get to the fly spray because they are crawling over every surface. Even if you did spray and kill them all, they would pile up to your chin in a dead heap on the floor. And as soon as they died a new one would come take their place anyway. Now they become a real problem. It's not th

der getting out the fly spray for that fly, but you'll just finish typing first. Flies are irritating, but they aren't THAT irritating. Now let's say instead of one fly - there were 70 million. You can't even get to the fly spray because they are crawling over every surface. Even if you did spray and kill them all, they would pile up to your chin in a dead heap on the floor. And as soon as they died a new one would come take their place anyway. Now they become a real problem. It's not the actual spam, it's the amount of spam. It's not a one off nuisance, it's a continual flood of messages send over and over.

Now not only are all these messages taking up bandwidth, but there is an expectation that ISP's will make some sort of effort to save you from receiving all this spam. So when you pay for your internet connection, not only are you paying the connection, but also for your ISP's spam fighting efforts - which probably include a few dedicated machines and staff. If you think spam is annoying now, imagine what it would be like if there weren't people in ISP's dedicated to stopping the flow of it?

It's not just a simple problem, and it's not just an inconvenience. It is an internet disease, and everyone can be infected. Even those who get off lightly in the amount of actual spam mail they receive are affected - their internet speed is compromised and their costs are increased.