Question

I have noticed that viewing images or websites that are hosted on US servers (Im in europe) is considerably slower. The main reason would be the latency because of the distance.

But if 1 packet takes n milliseconds to be received, can’t this be alleviated by sending more packets simultaneously?

Does this actually happen or are the packets sent one by one? And if yes what determines how many packets can be send simultaneously (something to do with the cable i guess)?

Answer 1

But if 1 packet takes n milliseconds
to be received, can’t this be
alleviated by sending more packets
simultaneously?

Not in a boundless way, by TCP/IP standards, because there algorithms that determine how much can be in flight and not yet acknowledged to avoid overloading the whole network.

Does this actually happen or are the
packets sent one by one?

TCP can and does keep up to a certain amount of packets and data “in flight”.

And if yes what determines how many
packets can be send simultaneously
(something to do with the cable i
guess)?

What cable? The same standards apply whether you’re on cabled, wireless, or mixed sequences of connections (remember your packet goes through many routers on its way to the destination, and the sequence of router can change among packets).

You can start your study of TCP e.g. wikipedia. Your specific questions deal with congestion control algorithms and standard, Wikipedia will give you pointers to all relevant algorithms and RFCs, but the whole picture won’t do you much good if you try to start studying at that spot without a lot of other understanding of TCP (e.g., its flow control concepts).

Wikipedia and similar encyclopedia/tutorial sites can only give you a summary of the summary, while RFCs are not studied to be readable, or understandable to non-experts. If you care about TCP, I’d recommend starting your study with Stevens’ immortal trilogy of books (though there are many other valid ones, Stevens’ are by far my personal favorites).