Friday 11 April 2014

Are Your Internet Sessions Stale?


The flow of data arrives
in peaks and troughs
By this we don’t mean boring, ‘stale’ is a technical term related to the flow of data.

Data, or anything you do over the internet, doesn’t actually come to your computer in a nice neat flow, it just looks that way. It actually comes in like a wave, but with the peaks and troughs happening so rapidly that you don’t notice.

Now imagine that you have several waves happening at the same time. Sometimes a peak and a trough will meet each other and create a process known as ‘interference‘. Basically, they cancel each other out and nothing happens. The data transfer dies, in effect, which is known as a ‘stale session’.

You’ll know when this happens to you when nothing happens. So the pages you are expecting to see… don’t appear. Nothing happens. It’s easy to fix though, if you click Refresh the process will start again and your pages will appear. Non-technical users are often left scratching their heads wondering why nothing happened first time, but did when they clicked Refresh.

It’s a natural process that will happen to everyone occasionally but if it happens often then there is a solution – use a more sophisticated router.

With IT equipment the difference in price between apparently similar items is often due to the quality of the individual components and the functionality built into them. More sophisticated – and therefore more expensive - routers are likely to have in-built software that balances the data transfers to prevent stale sessions – peaks and troughs meeting each other – from happening. This makes internet experiences faster and less frustrating for users.