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Comment by sirn | Hacker News Reader

Here in Bangkok, you can afford a pretty decent life at $400 a month given you don't live too close to a central part of the town. Internet here is cheap, $19.99 for a decent 6Mbps connection. Electricity is cheap, $65 for 24-hour air conditioning with always-on PC. Not sure about being hacker-friendly, though.

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Internet here is cheap, $19.99 for a decent 6Mbps connection.

What's that like for accessing stuff outside of .th? I hear about lots of cheap Internet with high bandwidth deals around the world but I have to wonder whether for accessing the typical US sites, a 1Mbps connection in the US would always be a win over even a 100Mbps connection in, say, Korea.

Depending on remote host, but I constantly get about 3Mbps when accessing servers located in US or Japan[1][2][3]. I'm using an old 4Mbps package here (6Mbps upgrade still doesn't available where I live), I'd say pretty good for the price.

[1]: http://www.speedtest.net/result/983221226.png

[2]: http://www.speedtest.net/result/983225975.png

[3]: http://www.speedtest.net/result/983227297.png

31ms from Thailand to SF? That's mindblowing. Speedtest gives me slightly higher to my local POP :-) I get 3.3/0.5 and 183ms to that San Fran point and I have an above average connection here in the UK. Very impressive.

I think there should be some error involved here. My calculations show that it is not physically possible:

minimum theoretical latency = d/c = 42.5 ms (EDIT: thanks for correction, ArturSoler!)

c = 300000 km/s, speed of light, http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs...

d = 12761 km, distance between San Francisco, CA and Bangkok, Thailand http://www.travelmath.com/flight-distance/from/San+Francisco...

By the way, speaking of locality, here in St.-Petersburg, Russia, now that I'm connected to the new Ethernet internet provider, I get 3 ms to google's servers, which means they are in the city already (they are; 8 hops). I haven't got such low latency to any Russian site yet. I actually decided to traceroute them when I read about a new Google's data center in Kotka, Finland and read suggestions that it might be used to serve Russia too. Good guess, but Google already does better than that, which shows their attention to maximizing quality of service.

Those latencies are achievable with a good Ethernet provider. DSL will add 10..20 ms, depending on modulation. Radio will add hundreds.

I think your calculation is not correct.

Your calculation is (300000 km/s)/(12761 km) = (23.5 (1/s))

Note the result is s^-1, not ms.

1/23.5 is 0.0425s, or 42.5ms, so that latency is not possible.

Ping starting to get weird just recently (not sure when, but very recent), before this it was ranged between 160ms and 260ms. Download speed stay the at ~3Mbps as before, though. (Both from Speedtest.net and from SCP to my Linode.)

if you've DSL it depends on "interleaving". It's something lik "ECC" and takes usually ~20ms. This does only affect latency not performance.

Here in Germany some providers even charge you on a monthly bassi to deactivate interlaving which they call "Fast Path" then…

2nd on that. By the way, I am from bkk too.

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