Surprise, Surprise: U.S. Broadband Is Slow. Really Slow.

[daft]

utah has a max of 12/1.5 from everywhere i've looked. and im going off of a 1.5/768! im just glad im not paying the $43

 

[Kari]

mitäs, I think Finlands result is severely distorted, no way in hell median DL speed is over 21Mbps. And why Sweden isn't mentioned at all, they've been pumping out money for few years to build fast fiber net all over the country, 100Mbps for every household kind of thingie..

And the size of the country doesn't count as much as the population density in urban areas.

 

[Guest]

Yes, im from south africa, our adsl is more expensive then your 3G in USA. And our international links are slow too... We have shaped ADSL accounts if jou knwo what that is, they actually shape(limit speed) traffic other than http and ftp. And we are capped too. We pay about equivalent of like 100$ per month for 512kb/s with 3GB cap shaped. So plz stop complaining, I promise you your internet is fast...

 

[doomsdaydave11]

[citation][nom]techguy911[/nom]Thats nothing some parts of europe around sweden-finland have 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection.How fast is that?In less than 2 seconds you can download a full-length movie on your home computer.[/citation]

lol. ONE person in the world has that connection. And she's crazy rich and like 70.
[citation][nom]Dave K[/nom]Sheesh what a silly article... are people really gullible enough to think that a Country the size of the US should have nationwide broadband the same speed as Japan and Korea? Those two countries are TINY and have large population concentrations... ideal territory for broadband.Can US broadband be improved? ABSOLUTELY... but fiber to the home is a large and time consuming investment when you're talking about the coverage areas the US companies have to deal with, and it will take time.I'm not a huge fan of US ISP's... but if you want to criticize them find something relevant, like the 'pay per gigabyte' profit grab boondoggle they're testing out down south.[/citation]
Exactly. They're comparing Japan to the US. Japan is far smaller, and technically much more advanced then the US. If Japan were the size of the US, I highly doubt they would be anywhere near the internet speed that they are at now.

To be honest, I really don't care. I don't need anything more then 3.0Mbps down, 600 up. The big files I just download when I'm sleeping, and anything under 100MB can be downloaded in

 

[Guest]

LOL here in SA(south africa) we pay about $90 for a 512kb/s connection and we get capped after 3GB of data transfers, and our connection is shaped for international traffic. Meaning other than http and ftp the traffic is slowed.

 

[nekatreven]

[citation][nom]duzcizgi[/nom]Sorry, in networks, 10 bits = 1 byte. encoding is 8/10. And I have 100 MBit here in Ukraine. [/citation]

I really hope I am misinterpreting your post, because in networks 8 bits still = 1 byte.

Each octet of an IP address ranges from 0 to 255 because each octet is one byte. "11111111" is 255 in binary, which is eight ones (or bits) side by side; so 8 bits.

If there were 10 bits in 1 byte then it would be ten ones side by side and that is 1023 in decimal. Not to mention that if it were 10 bits...they'd be called decatets...or something like that. So unless you know of some place where IP addresses have octets that range from 0-1023, there are always 8 bits in 1 byte.

It is true though that in networking you usually count things in groups of bits, and in terms of storage space its usually in bytes.

I'm still just hoping I misunderstood what you said though, cause otherwise you'd need to feel all embarrassed and pwned and such now.

 

[nekatreven]

Kudos to the few people who realize that the most of these other countries have a fraction of the people and land mass that the US has.

The fact that our broadband penetration and speeds can even be on the chart with these other countries means our infrastructure capabilities are freaking badass even if we are slower and have lower penetration.

Everyone else needs to realize that you could pave your driveway perfectly and call your land The Republic of Me and say, "I have the best and smoothest roads of any country in the world."...but when you are asked to pave the whole city or...i dunno...one of the largest countries in the world...you'll sit there with your thumb up your ass because doing things on that scale is hard, and the results are not as spectacular as smaller scale endeavors. Broadband is no different, and so these types of comparisons don't tell you a whole lot.

 

[iocedmyself]

A single PC not capable of hitting 100% utilization of gigabit connection? are you high?

Gigabit ethernet = 125 mb/s
10 Gigabit ethernet = 1,250 mb/s
100 Gigabit ethernet = 12,500mb/s

With the price drops to 750 Gig and TB Hard disks making them affordable to most PC users, either one as a single drive is capable of hitting 120-130 sustained spreeds. But a pair of 500 gig SATA II disks in raid 0 is capable of hitting 180 mb/s write.

SCSI, especially the old ultra 320 interface (which happens to be in use for part of my media server) is best suited for high traffic file servers, where I/O performance counts.

I have a 16 x 74 gig 16 mb cache 15k rpm SCSI array, on a Compaq SMART array 5300 raid controller. Thanks to ebay the disks cost a grand total of $320 (yup, $20 apeice) the raid card another $18. A dual channel controller can do a total 640mb/s bandwidth across 32 drives. Though if i wanted to play up the cost, the disks cost $2500 apiece 3 or 4 years ago.

Sata performs best with large file transfers, like ISO images, or video files. Sata can do 300 mb/s per channel, With eSata and the port multipliers it's quite easy to make use of the full bandwidth even using $50 250gig 7200 rpm disks. My 4x500 gig 7200 rpm 16mb cache raid 10 array on a rocket raid 2220 controller (which cost all of $250 for the disks, another $25 ebay find for the raid card) can hit 250 mb/s sustained write.

Is it likely anyone could make use of 5000 mb/s bandwidth from a 40 gigabit connection? Not really, despite Sata 600 standard coming into use, but a small bussiness, or a large family of computer nerds could probably use a fair bit of the bandwidth. ( for example, i know of one household of 6 people, each with thier own desktop, laptop and as one of them is a programmer also has 4 Server's running 24/7, which requires 2 DSL modems and a 16 mb down/ 5mb up cable connection to run smoothly)

When you consider the fact that a 45 min television show in 1080p has a file size of 6-7 gigs, to stream in real time 8mb download speeds aren't worth a damn if more then one person wants to do anything online.

 

[croc]

[citation][nom]Surge69[/nom]QQ more. Australia has a pathetic network (fastest most people can get is 1.5mbit) and we pay through the nose for it... [/citation]

I don't know where you live, but here in Sydney (and Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide...) we can get 10Mb down, 1.5 Mb up, with caps of 40GB / month for about 65AUD. Granted, if you are in Blackbutt you may have an issue, but even there satellite is available with decent download speeds (we'll not talk about the upload speeds...) but it WILL cost.

Not bad for a country that is 80% the size of the US, but with only 10% of the population...

 

[Mathos]

Sad but true. And it's mainly due to the fact that the broadband companies are almost outright refusing to compete with each other. There are many area's in Michigan where you only have 1 broadband provider available if any at all. Mt. morris for example is a moderately small town. You can get Comcast Cable internet there, max speed available is 10Mb/s down 1.5Mb up for about $70/month. Least thats what it was at the end of 06. The house where I lived there, literally had SBC fiber optic lines running underneath the sidewalks out in front of the yes, yet you couldn't get DSL there because according to the phone company there were no switches in the area and they had no plans of implementing them there. There were other area's where you could only get Charter Cable internet for example. The picture wasn't much brighter in cities like Flint for example from what I saw.

Now down here in Marshall Texas, I seem to live in an area that's an exception. You've got Charter Cable, AT&T, SouthWestern Bell, and I think even SBC yahoo all competing, not to mention a few local broadband players that use more exotic solutions, like Radio based broadband. Only problem is, they still don't compete price wise, still end up paying 50+ a month for a moderately fast connection. But go outside of town, and your pretty much SOL. You can't even get 56k dial up connections because of the copper to fiber optic translator units limiting dial up speed to 28.8k.

Unfortunately, these companies only care about getting their profits up, and likewise there stock prices to make their shareholders happy. They don't give a damn about customer satisfaction like they use to. For example I remember in the 80s when Charter would actually come to your house and demo their cable to you to try and get you to subscribe, that was back in the old 30 channel dial box days.

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]croc[/nom]I don't know where you live, but here in Sydney (and Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide...) we can get 10Mb down, 1.5 Mb up, with caps of 40GB / month for about 65AUD.[/citation]
Is that xDSL? Cable is shockingly overpriced, and usually gets stuck with 128k upload unless you have a fat wallet. And it won't get better while Telstra and Optus run the show. ADSL... well that depends on the time of day with TPG

 

[Guest]

@nekatreven:

A byte is still 8 bits... but each byte transferred over a network includes a couple additional bits of information (think of it as transfer overhead), hence the 10 bit rule of thumb.

 

[Guest]

@iocedmyself:

Your response is hard to read because you seem to be using mb/s and MB/s interchangeably... they're not interchangeable.
Gigabit ethernet - 1000mb/s or ~120MB/s (theoretical peak)

SATA HDD's:
You won't see >120-130MB/s sustained tranfer rates from even the fastest non-flash SATA drives out today... burst yes but not sustained. Sustained you can expect ~50MB/s from an average new disk... 80-90 if you buy the absolute fastest you can find. The 15k scsi drives I have in the system I referenced above are faster than anything SATA short of Flash (no 15k sata that I'm aware of) and can sustain >100MB/s individually.

I also never said that a single PC couldn't max out a gigabit connection, I said that no CONSUMER hardware is going to max out that connection, and that's correct. A properly built custom box could do it... but what consumer machine needs an expensive server network card, and what consumer home network spends hundreds of dollars on decent switching hardware.

You see, the drive transfer rate is only one part of the equation, you can't ignore the overhead of getting all that data onto and across the network, which once you get much over 50MB/s becomes the real limiting factor. If you've got a standard consumer box, you don't have particularly good ethernet so the OS is going to need to implement most of the protocol stack - throttling transfer speed. Forget about DMA from the HDD to the Network Card... you've got to transfer everything to memory, let the processor run it through the stack and then transfer it to the card. New consumer PC's are blazing fast... but transferring data is transferring data and it adds time.

60% utilization of a gigabit pipe is around 600mbps or 60 MB/s... if you can do that with an off the shelf machine on your home network you're doing VERY well indeed. The majority of consumer machines couldn't sustain 30MB/s network traffic much less 60MB/s.

The example I gave was real world... transferring a 1.4GB MTS file while I was editing, not a purpose constructed speed test. The two machines I was transferring between were both beyond consumer, one a high end workstation ($10k Quad processor Opteron, 2TB PCIX RAIDCore, 146 GB U320 PCIX Adaptec), the other a server (Dual processor Xenon, 1TB RAID5 & 36GB SATA RAID1) and the infrastructure between them was also decent, above consumer grade (3com 16 port gigabit switch).

As I said, the average home network would be hard pressed to exceed 30MB/s machine to machine transfer rate over gigabit ethernet. EVERYTHING on home networks is cheap, most of the low cost gigabit switches would limit the transfer rate all by themselves... add to that the $15 gigabit ethernet cards (or even cheaper integrated motherboard chipsets) and the commodity HDD's and you're not going to equal 100MB/s network file transfers at ANY part of the pipeline much less through the whole pipe.

So no... I'm not high... and I am correct.

In the real world, a 40gb connection is a MONSTEROUS pipe, providing backbone level throughput. I read recently that youtube uses about 70gbps averaged over a month... (>100million video downloads per day). It's also guessed that Youtube is paying as much as a million dollars a month for that bandwidth.

 

[Guest]

Xeon not Xenon... playing too much X3 I guess.

 

[nekatreven]

[citation][nom]Dave K[/nom]@nekatreven:A byte is still 8 bits... but each byte transferred over a network includes a couple additional bits of information (think of it as transfer overhead), hence the 10 bit rule of thumb.[/citation]

Okay well then I was wrong in taking his post literally. I personally have never heard that one (and I worked at an ISP for years).

I don't imagine its a very practical rule of thumb though.

I personally have run speed tests on 175 and 300 Mbit fiber pipes located in the US, and (using a standard 100Mbit NIC) the Windows networking stack maxes out at just over 70 Mbit on a good day. Linux is better but not perfect.

If you want rules of thumb for actual throughput calculations, it seems to me that this large of a per client throughput limit is a much bigger deal than packet overhead being estimated at costing 2 extra bits per byte on routing hardware.

Obviously these numbers could vary widely, but that 30% is only based on 100Mbit pc connections (although more than 100Mbit was available to the PC on the WAN side). The throughput loss grows real quick once you pass 100Mbit connections and I suspect that a good hardware GigE card may not have done much for these numbers in this scenario.

I guess what I'm saying is once you get your actual throughput numbers from the theoretical maximums, I think you'll have lost so much already that packet overhead won't make much of a difference. In fact that overhead is already a part of what is keeping you from the maximums so in some cases you'd be counting it twice.