[LINK] America's Internet Disconnect

[Adrian Chadd]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2006, rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au wrote:

> Oh, all right. Speed of light in fibre is 70% of vacuum. Roughly 60ms 
> each way.

I still think thats a bit low (60ms each way), but alright.

Before the delays in crossing the country/ies depending on sites visited;
so assuming 120ms RTT thats ~360ms minimum before its established
a TCP connection (and if you're in perth going per->eastcoast->westcoast US->
eastcoast US thats 60+120+50 = 230ms * 700ms before TCP handshake is
established.) Don't even ask about Perth->eastcoast->US->europe paths;
or that whacky 23ms my wholesale T$'ed delivered tail seems to be
seeing:

PING www.vuurwerk.nl (62.250.3.21): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 62.250.3.21: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=411.913 ms

AFAICT, thats going me->ISP->optus->magic->teleglobe US->teleglobe paris->
teleglobe->amsterdam->vuurwerk and back. Gotta be great for perceived
loading speed. You can still achieve fast TCP over high(ish) latency links
with tuning and buffer tricks but it requires ramp-up time and large
client/server buffers; both of which are in a premium with large-scale
web services.

Its quickly starting to hit "a second" and that kinda delay will impact
on the rendering speeds of web pages if you're not careful. Thats -part- of
the perceived slowness that I see kicking around.

> <small grin> I would have left Bright out of the list ... IIRC one of 
> the reasons Bright had a long hiatus was that Western Power found a $26 
> M investment in not-very-much fibre... Yes, cheap transit and cheap 
> backhaul are the two biggies; and in particular we pay over-the-odds for 
> transit. If the ISP pays 5x the US price for transit, it buys less.

Bright may have stopped rolling out FTTN (even though IMHO they should've
just dropped fibre wherever they could, lit or not lit; it'll have been
used at some point - but then, thats why I'm not in business!) but they're
still in the game as far as Perth metro fibre point-to-point and business
delivery. just not fibre-to-home. :) They had a sales person that kept
promising stuff that just wasn't able to be delivered on time (and he's
left now) but once the PtP ethernet service is in its rock solid.

(I did ask em how much it'd cost to drop fiber from their nearest point
to where I live in Stirling; was >$20k. Now if I could get an entire block
interested..)

If an ISP pays 5x the US price for transit, they can either buy less, 
charge more, find a balance, or use caching stuff. Ah, how I wish Squid
were a bit faster these days..



Adrian