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.
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.
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...
He upgraded to 50Mbps/1.5Mbps upstream and his problems went away.
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.
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.
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.
We've finally gotten another operator, but... We're not really holding our breath for cheaper Internet just yet. Maybe... Who knows?
In real world use it normally pulls app. 5-6 MB per second off the general internet.
At our office we pay something like $2k for a business grade 100Mb/s symmetrical uncapped.