What's the general connection speed of everyone on HN? Does anyone have an insane connection?
Mine is 4Mbit/s in South Africa, we're getting 8Mbit/s soon and possibly 10Mbit/s. It's pretty expensive; ~$200 p/m for an shaped and uncapped connection.
I get about 4Mbps on a connection that advertises itself, in true British ISP fashion, as "up-to" 24Mbps. However, I pay a far less eye-watering ~$11 a month for a connection with no formal cap (although there is a "fair use policy" so if you sit seeding torrents for an entire month you're likely to get a nasty letter). It's spotty, unreliable, disconnects and reconnects at a slower speed at night and conks out if someone in the house picks the phone up.
I don't know what it's like in other countries, but no one here seems to get what their connection is "up-to". The closest I know of is a friend in London who gets about 18Mbps.
In my area, they're apparently installing FTTC (cabinet) this summer. It basically means it'll only be copper for the final 100 metres or so and will offer "up-to" 40Mbps. I'll wait and see...
I was visiting my brother in December in London. He had 24Mbps connection from Virgin. It was saturated to death during peak times. His major problem seemed to be the upstream.
He upgraded to 50Mbps/1.5Mbps upstream and his problems went away.
I'm getting 8Mbit/s down, 768kbit/s up on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria, at €21/month, no limits. In parts of the centre you can get 50Mbit/s fibre for a similar price. Anything faster is niche and expensive.
I recently visited South Africa and noticed that the connection to the rest of the world was really slow. SA-based sites loaded at reasonable speeds, but gmail and such took forever. Is that an actual, real problem, or did I just end up on a connection from a bad ISP? I realise that the physical distance alone introduces lag, but visiting web pages hosted in Australia (pretty much as far as you can get from here) isn't noticeably slower from Europe, you just don't want to play FPS games over that sort of distance.
Wow, interesting. Is Europe-bound traffic really expensive for the ISPs or is this basically just a money-making scheme?
As far as I know there are only 2 major connections out of southern Africa, one all the way just off the west coast to Europe (with a branch to South America) and one through the Indian Ocean to India. I guess that duopoly could easily be used to drive up prices.
I get 100 Mbit/s through SUNET (Swedish university computer network) like almost all students in Sweden, which these days don't even raise an eyebrow. About €20 every six months. It's also worth mentioning that in Sweden download caps in any form are (almost) unheard of. You get what you pay for.
I'm also in Sweden, with 100 Mbit/s FTTB (Cat. 7) via OpenNet for $45/month. FTTH is present but not currently enabled. Once you have FTTx you're quite future proof, if it was installed "correctly". I use Bahnhof as my ISP, for their nice stance on privacy.
I know this isn't Reddit so hopefully there will be no whining to preempt here. But I just want to point out that except for two cases on this list, these are just pilot programs, and of the production installations only Sweden's seems widely available.
I seem to remember that there are several places in Japan where you can get it from a commercial provider.
I also remember being envious of some friends up north in Sweden in Luleå that lived in some sort of student apartments where they had 100/100Mbit connections back in 2000 or so, and I think they got upgraded to gigabit, but that's sort of special since it was subsidized by the university to attract students.
You also have people like Peter Löthberg (heavily involved in connecting SUNET to the internet in the 80s) who installed a 40Gb connection at his mother's as an experiment to see how she would use it.
Anyway, there's very little general availability, there's a few limited municipal networks that have the capacity for gigabit. 100/100Mbit is available for a lot of people, and everyone living in a larger city can get 20/3Mbit dsl or cable or similar.
I saw that one cable company has started rolling out 100Mbit, so that'll pressure the existing 100Mbit providers to up their bandwidth.
We used to live in a building with 140 apartments, and it shocked me that we had to work for close to 6 months to find more than 10 people interested in getting a true 1Gbps link installed. The rates would end up being cheaper than the ADSL/cable people already had, but still no go.
Originally, we were supposed to bring on board more than 20 people, but the company installing the link felt so bad for us that they went ahead with the few we managed to find anyways.
And then we moved to get out of the city. Back to unstable and horrible cable. Bleh.
I am curious. Is there any technical reason why you cant have the same high up/down speed? Is it more expensive?
If Google provides a service with a high upload speed, I can see myself hosting my own server from home. Crappy upload speed is the only thing stopping me from hosting servers myself from my home line.
PON FTTH is a shared medium typically being split 32 or 64 ways so there is some over subscription to consider but for the most part there are no major technical limitations to offering symmetrical speeds. For cable ISPs there are a few problems: The amount usable of return/upstream spectrum on a cable plant is traditionally much lower than the amount of forward/downstream DOCSIS bandwidth. Until DOCSIS 3 there was no cost effective way to utilize all of the available spectrum anyway. DOCSIS 3 introduces upstream channel bonding and pushes forward with SCDMA modulation which, in theory, makes the lower/noisier spectrum under 20Mhz usable. Some cable ISPs are planning for more return spectrum space (50-75Mhz) which also solves the problem. The big hardware players in that space are lagging behind a bit on upstream bonding but it should be available soon. (it's already out there in limited deployments)
For the general well being of the Internet I think any provider offering 1Gb/sec upload speeds to residential users needs to do deep packet inspection or employ some other method to protect against malware driven attacks. You can do some real harm with 1Gb/sec. DPI would probably be preferred since it could snoop out known attacks and allow the customer to utilize their upstream speeds legitimately. A blanket QoS policy for high usage is easier but has some obvious downsides. Probably not a bad idea at the 50-100Mbit/sec range either. There's too much malware out there to be oblivious to the risks.
That would obviously depend on many, many things, but when I was in Japan I regularly uploaded at 60+Mb/s on a 100Mb connection, which basically maxed out my CPU. I assume that, given reasonable contention ratios, you'd be able to upload at a good proportion of the 1Gbps to any peer, over any pipe, able to accept it. I wouldn't count on being able to get anything like that over an international link but to your friend in the next suburb, sure.
Canberra, Australia: TransACT, an Australian service provider, is trailing a network with speeds of up to 1 Gbps for residential customers.
Uh-huh. What's the quota (bandwidth limit)? Knowing Australia, it's something like 30GB/month, meaning that theoretically you could burn through your entire monthly allocation in under 5 minutes.
iiNet and Internode are also playing around with fibre in some new housing estates, here's an internode pricelist:
Mine is 4Mbit/s in South Africa, we're getting 8Mbit/s soon and possibly 10Mbit/s. It's pretty expensive; ~$200 p/m for an shaped and uncapped connection.