[jpollock]

As I learned in New Zealand, the data rate to the ISP is largely irrelevant. I had a 100mbps+ connection in NZ, but rarely got over 2mbps to any international location. It would speedtest at full line rate.

However, here in the US, I've got a 50mbps connection, and I regularly get 50mbps.

[ethbro]

US broadband interconnects with the rest of the network are pretty terrible.

Reference: those name-and-shame articles a while back from a network company (Level 3, from memory?) that produced hard numbers on how little $ US cable/DSL internet companies were willing to put into improving their capacity at the peer link.

[Edit] Yup, Level 3. I thought they were interesting because hard numbers at this level seem difficult to come by. Here are the articles from 2014:

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/chicken-game-played-chi...

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-m...

[vdaniuk]

These are mostly real international data transfer rates, at least for torrents/CDN servers/S3.