[LINK] America's Internet Disconnect

[Adrian Chadd]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006, Pilcher, Fred wrote:

> You're right of course,  I'm being subjective. But by and large, ordinary surfing over their dialup felt like my ordinary surfing here; downloads were a little slower, but not hugely. If I can get 100Kb/s I consider it exceptional - they seemed to get the full 56Kb/s most of the time, which is certainly as good as or better than I get most of the time. 

It depends where you're downloading from. Well, ok, it depends on the ISP -
but the speed of light starts playing a part in perceived speed after a
few thou miles.

> Broadband was another thing. Cases in point: last night a US friend and I were downloading similar-sized files from the same US server at the same time. It took me an hour and a half - it took her about fifteen minutes. I sometimes VNC in to another friend's PC in the US to help sort out his problems - if I download a 10MB utility on his PC it comes down in a matter of seconds whereas it'd take a few minutes for me.

Try downloading from a fast Australian mirror.

> Of course this is no kind of technical analysis. I know that one swallow does not a summer make and, as I said, I don't expect identical performance. But I do get the distinct feeling that we're being diddled.
> 
> If I'm wrong and just deluding myself, then I apologise.

Well, you're not -specifically- wrong, but its an interesting case in point.
Of course Australia is going to be perceived as being slower when accessing US
sites over, say, someone in the US. There's technologies available to
mitigate that (for example, have a look at how Google beautifully use HTTP/1.1
to get the fastest page load times possible by using HTTP pipelining and
minimal numbers of concurrent connections, over other sites that oft pull in
ads and media from a dozen different locations - all of which have to finish
before the page renders) but, by and large, we're going to suck when accessing
stuff in the US.

What you should do is compare load times to -local- Australian sites. I'm sure
you'll find news.com.au loads faster for you than it does for your American friend.
Or using the Optus mirror is faster for you than your American friend.
(Random data point: 2mbit telstra connection out in the middle of Australia, so its
an EXPENSIVE 2mbit connection) was able to pull ISOs off the Optus mirror at
192kbytes/sec.  The only reason it wasn't higher is that the link was being used by
others (theoretical max 256kbytes/sec; practical max a bit less.)

So using US sites as a measuring stick is always going to be the problem.



Adrian