[LINK] Why is European broadband faster and cheaper?

[Paul Brooks]

On 1/07/2011 9:12 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
> In the study below Australia has the third worst Average download speed.  We're one of the most expensive and we aren't even mentioned in the very high speed tier.  They talk about how local loop unbundling and function separation is essential for getting broadband advances.
>
> http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper-blame-the-governme/
P60 of the report shows AU with an average latency of roughly 160ms, and NZ average
latency of roughly 180ms, according to speedtest.net.
This is suspiciously close to the expected latency from testing against US or
Europe-based servers, whcih would tend to reduce average download speeds greatly
compared to the actual capability of the access line.

FWIW, using speedtest.net from an Optus HFC connection in Sydney, I was connected to a
server in Sydney also on Optus, with latency measured as 40ms.
Changing to a server hosted by another ISP in Canberra, latency was logged at 32ms.
Changing to a server hosted by Optus in Melbourne, latency was logged at 37ms.
Changing back to the Sydney-based Optus server, latency was logged at 24ms

This tells me:
a) Speedtest.net doesn't measure latency very well, yet these were the figures used in
the Berkman study
b) There must have been a huge number of tests from Australia that did not use servers
in Australia, or were sitting on the end of satellite links, logging extremely high
latencies, to average out the measurements with a more reasonable 20 - 40 ms to
'fairly local' servers to arrive at an average latency of 160ms for AU
c) All those Speedtest.net measurements that logged latencies of 160ms+ are likely to
have polluted the average download speed measurements, dragging the average lower than
reality.

It would be fascinating to get the Speedtest.net data for AU, with all the tests with
latency > 100ms cut out, and see what the averages come to then.

P.