[LINK] America's Internet Disconnect

[Adrian Chadd]

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

> Thanks Adrian, that helps to put things in perspective. I guess my perception that I was getting a worse service was based more on the location of the servers and our distance from them than anything else. I had an impression that the speeds were similarly slower when I download from Australian mirrors, but perhaps not. I feel a little better.
> 

Your views aren't unique; I'm sure they're echoed across userbase.
Unfortunately educating users is probably not going to work.
Technologies which smart-route content delivery to be from "closer"
locations (such as the P2P stuff; if only ISPs didn't treat it as
anethma!) and CDN stuff like Akamai is where its at.

Caching technologies help here too, in the case of WWW stuff.
The gaming groups like Blizzard have identified that they can't
just place all their servers in the US - they run servers in different
places around the world for various reasons (latency is one of them,
but there's also cultural/social diglossia which they're trying to
deal with/exploit.)

Its just a shame that a large chunk of web developers don't try to
optimise their site for cachability (or go out of their way to make
it NOT cachable for various reasons.)



Adrian