[pistoriusp]

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.

[andyking]

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...

[pistoriusp]

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.

[pmjordan]

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.

[pistoriusp]

This problem usually occurs with shaped accounts. During working hours the connection is shaped, and therefore, cheaper.

The alternative is to pay a lot of money and have a download cap (5GB ~$67 p/m/ 10GB ~$85 p/m).

Right now, on an unshaped account I've got a 200ms ping to google.com; on a shaped account it'll be ~800ms.

[pmjordan]

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.

[pistoriusp]

It's a money making scheme. We've used to only have a single operator that is 50% owned by the government.

We've finally gotten another operator, but... We're not really holding our breath for cheaper Internet just yet. Maybe... Who knows?

[nixy]

I get 100 Mbit/s here in Sweden, included in my rent.

[thirdusername]

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.

[stse]

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.

[johnyzee]

I probably have one of the better home connections in Copenhagen, at 50 mbit/s for $12 monthly.

In real world use it normally pulls app. 5-6 MB per second off the general internet.

[ohashi]

http://www.speedtest.net/result/595054175.png

99/21

[Devilboy]

Most people I know here in Sydney pays about $100 per month for between 5 and 20Mb/s. Download limits are around 20-100GB per month.

At our office we pay something like $2k for a business grade 100Mb/s symmetrical uncapped.