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by jlgaddis 3403 days ago
The most important question is, of course, what's your Internet connection like? :-)

I think this is awesome. If this were one year ago (when I was newly single), I would've been on the first flight out to come visit for a month or so!
1 comments
jessriedel 3403 days ago
> 100 / 10 Mbit/s fiber internet
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walrus01 3403 days ago
That doesn't answer jitter, reliability, packet loss... There's lots of less than stellar ISPs doing 100Mbps fiber with 1+0 everything and no UPS on any of their nodes.

I did a brief search for the top ten Maltese ASNs, and there are not a lot of routes in and out of there, and not much submarine fiber. This is to be expected with any small island nation, however.

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paulddraper 3403 days ago
> That doesn't answer jitter, reliability, packet loss...

But what answer does?

My question is sincere.

When I ask someone -- friend, coworker, ISP -- about internet quality, what's the answer I should be looking for? Always seems like a crapshoot to me.

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walrus01 3403 days ago
It is indeed a crapshoot. I'm lucky enough to work in network engineering in an area where I can contact the tier-3 support for most of the local last mile ISPs if something has gone seriously wrong. But there is immense variation in residential internet quality even within the same company and AS. Some parts of the Comcast network are rock solid, others are shit. Same for many adsl2+, vdsl2 and docsis3 operators.

The other problem is that one person's perception of shit internet is very different from another's. Less than 0.1% of ordinary internet customers know how to use tools like smokeping and test to their own wholly controlled iperf server on a 10GbE connection.

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mirimir 3403 days ago
> test to their own wholly controlled iperf server on a 10GbE connection.

Well, bouygues.testdebit.info, ping.online.net and speedtest.serverius.net are on 10 Gbps, and only test one peer at a time.

https://iperf.fr/iperf-servers.php

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paulddraper 3403 days ago
> Less than 0.1% of ordinary internet customers know how to use tools like smokeping

Even if they could, is there really anything to be done with that information?

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