Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

DSL's in a good mood today:

That looks just like my speeds in Cavendish, Vermont, in the boonies!

And even there, it's possible to get some more speed!

I moved to Springfield, Vt on March 5, 2008 and glad I did!

I get 12.0 Mb down in Springfield with the same ISP I have.

[shovenose]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

For what it's worth, I was out in Point Reyes this weekend (for those who have no idea what that is, it's even more out in the midle of nowhere than Fairfax), and guess what? The cable internet at the house I stayed at had very nice internet, provided by Level 3 Communications (don't they only provide internet for datacenters?) and it gets 14M down abd 0.8M up

[mariushm]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

Yeah... I'm sure a website on a shared hosting account at GoDaddy will give you accurate results.
Or better put, I should trust a guy with 3 posts (first 2 being totally useless and empty of any information) that spams his website on the third post.

[acstech]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

This is a radio connection. The problem is they had it throttled 11 years ago when they set it up, and never bothered to update it because they have a monopoly on this area. It's more than a couple miles to town, with trees in the way, otherwise it might try it.

The town has great speeds. It's just that for years they stopped precisely at the city border. Now, that policy has been changed.

At any rate, I'll have the following choices sometime next year, when they get fiber out here:

Mbps down / up - price
12/1 - $56
20/2 - $75
25/5 - $104
50/5 - $150

I think Flo-Ban (as I like to call my current ISP) will go out of business shortly thereafter.

[mariushm]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

acstech - can't you work out some radio connection somehow? All town has the same poor speeds?

As in talk to someone 1-2 miles from you to let you plug a switch and a directional radio antenna on their roof and if you're in straight line/direct view you're golden.

[shovenose]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

Ouch! I guess I should appreciate my internet a little more than I do...
But still, that sucks!

[acstech]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

Here is the speed at my house:



I'm pretty sure there's people living in mud huts in Africa with better internet speed. I won't get into how much I have to pay for that ****.

For the record, that is my *only* option. It's either that, or dial-up. Period. The in-town cable provider will get out here sometime next year, then I'll have decent speeds. Until then... no.

[shovenose]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

Neat! I'm putting that on my website

[Scenic]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

this might work
http://www.speedtest.net/mini.php

[shovenose]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

Ugh Android is installing a bunch of App updates... I never really believe the speedtest.net android app results...
Doing it 3 consecutive time makes 3 totally different results...


DSL's in a good mood today:


This is on my phone, like 5 seconds before the PC one...

[Scenic]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

not possible. most likely cached

http://www.speedtest.net/mobile.php

[shovenose]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

I wish the attached screenshot from my phone were accurate... or is it?
Apparently this app is based on Ookla software, which is also the same used by Speedtest.net

Is this accurate you think?

[mariushm]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

within the country:

within europe :

The first one is to a datacenter 200 miles away in Bucharest, at the other major ISP (the two major ones have peering agreements)
The second is 600 miles away in Germany...

later edit: Oh.. I do live in one of the major cities of Romania, though. Smaller cities or villages or as you say the boonies (most of them) don't have the infrastructure to get 100 mbps, at this ISP for example they're still connected through DOCSIS 2 standard, which can deliver a max of about 35 mbps. I'd say they may have a bit more unstable connections, but overall it's not as bad as what I see from shovenose for example.
And even in those boonies, you could still get ADSL+ (about 8-24mbps/1-3 mbps up) as the old phone company pretty much upgraded all their telephone systems to digital.

There's also several phone networks which have coverage pretty much everywhere (but 3G and internet access has less coverage)... For example you can get for 12 euro a month this: http://www.orange.ro/internet-mobil/...-10/index.html (3 GB at 21.6/5.6 mbps, 128kbps after, free between midnight and 7 am)
Vodafone has something similar starting from 9 euro a month, but with no free traffic during the nights : https://www.vodafone.ro/personal/int...e-pc/index.htm



I wouldn't say 110-150 ms is bad, for going across the ocean and in the last picture, quite a long way to Dallas (5800 miles).

Speaking of money... yeah, 31 dollars here is more like if you'd pay 80-100 dollars in US, as the average salaries here are much lower, the majority being probably about 700-800 dollars a month. The majority of people would choose the plans that go up to about 25 mbps and they'd pay for plans with less TV channels.

Still, there's quite a lot of people working at IT or foreign companies with offices here that get paid over 1000-1500$ which is quite a lot, so it makes sense to have such plans available. Myself, I make close to 2000$ as a freelancer, and considering I work from home, it's quite a comfortable living.

As for content distribution, it works great... the ISP has Akamai servers within the network - I get 100mbps from those servers. Youtube delivers videos from their German and French datacenters so no issues there...
Most content delivery networks have a lot of servers in Europe also.

[mockingbird]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

It's a long story but ISP companies here even had to compete with and buy out small networks people made in neighborhoods (someone used to pay something like 300$ a month in today's money for 128kbps and share it with several people, just so they wouldn't use dial up and have it throughout the day)

Yea, but how good is it outside Bucharest? Canada is pretty good about their coverage, except out in the boonies.

If I were just a student I could get on by with just the free internet, where you just pay 10$ for the cable modem. But I'd be able to afford 10/2 for 3$ a month as well.

You can spoof and uncap a conection and use it for free. I wonder how vigilant about that they are in Romania. In Canada I heard that Rogers is extremely strict about detecting spoofers, but not so with American Cable ISPs. For the record, I have never done anything like this.

mockingbird; Scenic has it spot on, if I *can* get such a speed why settle for less?
Sure, the 100/10 connection is a bit cheaper at €32 vs €38 for the full speed 100/100 connection.
If I go down another notch to 10/10 the price is €25 and if I go down to 5/5 it is €18
That is the lowest speed I can get with a subscription, my apartment rental includes a 0.5mbps connection for free

Because that is a lot of money. We're talking about Euros here, not dollars. Marius is really getting a good deal, if you don't mind the high latency to the US (Though I'm not sure how big websites have their content distribution set up with Europe or if there even are special content distribution servers for Europe), but you're not. The 10/10 plan is a great deal though.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

mockingbird; Scenic has it spot on, if I *can* get such a speed why settle for less?
Sure, the 100/10 connection is a bit cheaper at €32 vs €38 for the full speed 100/100 connection.
If I go down another notch to 10/10 the price is €25 and if I go down to 5/5 it is €18
That is the lowest speed I can get with a subscription, my apartment rental includes a 0.5mbps connection for free

All these are unmetered full speed connections with no download caps.
I use the connection so much that I simply want the best speed I can get...

[mariushm]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

mockingbird : these high bw plans are a consequence of competition between 2 large ISP companies, about 4-5 phone companies and several small local ISP companies.

It's a long story but ISP companies here even had to compete with and buy out small networks people made in neighborhoods (someone used to pay something like 300$ a month in today's money for 128kbps and share it with several people, just so they wouldn't use dial up and have it throughout the day)

My ISP has these plans now:



Just divide the LEI by 3 and you get the dollars. Then multiply by 1.24 to get final price (24% VAT in this country).

If I were just a student I could get on by with just the free internet, where you just pay 10$ for the cable modem. But I'd be able to afford 10/2 for 3$ a month as well.

I got the 100/6 for about 45 LEI (15$) + digital tv for about 15$ + phone with unlimited calls within network for about 2$ a month, everything discounted to about 22 dollars because i subscribed for 2 years and further got 50% off for 6 months.
So with VAT, I pay in total about 31$ now.

A couple of weeks later they changed it to 120/6 because the other major ISP started to offer 100/4 at a cheaper price. But really, I didn't even call them to upgrade me, they would probably do it if I ask.

It just doesn't make sense to go down to 60/4 just to save a handful of dollars. I also work a lot with videos (doing video encoding, processing for a company) so I have periods when I download 60-100 GB over night, there's no complaints from anyone.

The other ISP offers 50mbps/4 mbps for about 12$ and 100/4 for 20$ but outside the country they're both capped to about 12-15 mbps download speed. But they have a better tv offering (football, champions league etc) so they get more people that way nowadays.

[dumpystig]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

Been having diminishing speed speeds for a few days until my connection was finally lost today. After contacting my ISP I'm now back to normal...

[Scenic]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

Marius and Per, what do you need such fast internet for? Do you have a 24/7 linkup with the security cameras in your cattle barns, or are you running some kind high-speed, village-wide multiplayer Tetris tournament?

If you can get a connection like that for that price, why go for anything lower (unless it's crippled by traffic limits)?

Fiber(re?) connections are getting increasingly popular. Especially up north (in Europe).
NL is coming up with that stuff too.. actually pretty much every country.. except germany it seems

Fiber connections here seem to be limited to the biggest cities at the moment..
Where I live, internet connectivity is just laughable. The best that could be shoved through the phone lines (DSL) is around 8.5MBit/s (crappy lines) or 25MBit via cable, but with ridiculously undersized upload speeds (512KBit), which makes the whole thing kinda pointless as it's less than what we get now with regular DSL

To be honest, I'm fine with 6MBit download speeds. What makes it a pain is the seemingly always undersized upload speed.
For example, uploading a video to youtube..
a) takes forever
b) pretty much kills the connection for everyone else in the household
c) you can't do anything else while it's uploading (feels like 56k dialup)

When i upload videos, i usually try to do it late at night, cause it literally takes at least an hour depending on the length and quality of the video. And that's pretty much an hour without internet as it's too slow/unresponsive to be usable.

[mockingbird]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

My ISP is Bell (Canada) and apparently I'm using their FIBE-6 service.

You're aware that there is a company out there that you pay another $10 a month to, and they provide you with a seperate PPPoE username/pass that you can use that has unlimited caps?

Marius and Per, what do you need such fast internet for? Do you have a 24/7 linkup with the security cameras in your cattle barns, or are you running some kind high-speed, village-wide multiplayer Tetris tournament?

smason, what does Shaw charge you a month for that?

We used to have Shaw in our area until Rogers engulfed them. Ah, the good old days. People here pay a fortune for Rogers and the bandwidth caps are ridiculous.

[smason]

Re: Internet Speed (Speedtest.net)

smason, what does Shaw charge you a month for that?

Oh we pay through the nose for it. $62.00/mo the advertised speed is 25MB down, 2.5 up 250GB max/month.
The download speed *is* consistently good.

I don't much care about upload speed or the transfer limit, I'm not a big leecher, so it works for me, but when I see the Europeans (especially that Swedish one) I get pretty jealous.