Just to make sure we're fairly comparing technologies rather than the bad shape regulation has left their delivery in North America in... Here are some speedtest.net measurements from today (Friday New Zealand time), using a selection of servers around the world (with an unashamed selection bias towards the Pacific): 1) Between 5 and 6 pm from my docked laptop at work (UoA), on GbE with fibre backhaul: Location Server Down Up RTT Auckland WorldNet 831.45 914.17 1 Auckland Vodafone 881.13 930.93 3 Sydney Optus 904.4 335.73 29 Sydney Vodafone Hutchinson 803.63 683.94 27 Hong Kong HKIX 101.04 73.39 284 Hong Kong i3D.net 86.42 39.58 174 Tokyo OPEN Project (via 20G SINET) 26.31 30.51 256 Tokyo i3D.net 326.54 15.69 140 Los Angeles i3D.net 342.85 149.84 158 Los Angeles 2degrees 388.95 187.5 125 Rarotonga Vodafone Cook Islands 75.1 0.31 280 Apia, Samoa Digicel Samoa 736.72 289.8 76 Bairiki, Kiribati ATHKL 20.41 3.07 333 on satellite (SES/O3b MEO) New York Atlantic Metro 481.01 120.29 197 London UK Dedicated Servers 114.37 83.21 272 Frankfurt Deutsche Telekom 194.7 77 299 2) Between 8:30 and 9:30 pm from my residential home fibre connection (bog standard suburban Auckland install). I did a traceroute on a couple of them to show that the path isn't always obvious or anywhere near shortest. A lot of traffic that should really stay on the western side of the Pacific makes its way all the way to the US mainland: Location Server Down Up RTT Auckland WorldNet 868.67 476.85 3 Auckland Vodafone 894.84 458.47 2 own ISP Sydney Optus 713.48 109.84 31 Sydney Vodafone Hutchinson 528.21 166.57 33 Hong Kong HKIX 119.29 26.84 266 traceroute goes via Hurricane Electric in LAX Hong Kong i3D.net 120.66 7.75 265 also via HE in LAX Tokyo OPEN Project (via 20G SINET) 130.87 38.63 235 Tokyo i3D.net 61.02 31.18 241 Los Angeles i3D.net 295.05 65.19 128 Los Angeles 2degrees 544.75 59.69 127 Rarotonga Vodafone Cook Islands 43.99 1.09 248 These guys are on the Manatua cable from Samoa to Tahiti. Going by the traceroute, the traffic goes from NZ to Hurricane Electric in LAX (either via Hawaiki or Southern Cross Cable)and from there down on the Hawaiki cable to American Samoa, from there to Western Samoa and onto the Manatua cable from there. Must have a chat to their CEO to find out what is going on there. Apia, Samoa Digicel Samoa 365.01 7.45 79 I'm not sure what is going on there with their inbound connection. Tide out? Bairiki, Kiribati ATHKL 12.49 2.04 489 on satellite (SES/O3b MEO) New York Atlantic Metro 412.56 0 230 no upload for some odd reason London UK Dedicated Servers 45.39 31.9 262 Frankfurt Deutsche Telekom 183.99 23.36 270 Rates in Mb/s, RTT in ms. So working from home's just marginally worse in terms of Internet here in Auckland than being at uni. And they haven't even connected the Southern Cross Next cable yet. I pay about US$73 / month, which includes a static public IPv4 address and home phone. As for the islands, the only satellite-connected place with a speedtest server I could find was Bairiki, which is part of Tarawa Atoll in Kiribati, where one of the ISPs uses SES/O3b MEO (the rest use GEO). It still has a whoppingly large RTT (probably around 130-140 ms pure MEO link, without queue sojourn times). I've also observed dozens of milliseconds of delay INSIDE Tarawa in the past, so quite whether there's a segment of old coconut telegraph in there that hasn't been upgraded yet, I don't know. People on GEO in this part of the world would be well advised not to host speedtest servers - it would eat through their data caps in no time and make them deeply unpopular with their fellow locals. -- **************************************************************** Dr. Ulrich Speidel School of Computer Science Room 303S.594 (City Campus) Ph: (+64-9)-373-7599 ext. 85282 The University of Auckland ulrich@cs.auckland.ac.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/ ****************************************************************