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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Now, let’s put these numbers into perspective. According to Ookla’s Net Index, the average speed for a country in Europe is around 12 Mb/second.

That's partly because most people are happy with such speeds (or at least the speed/price ratio). At home I have a subscription with 120MBit/s downstream. Speed tests usually give 130MBit/s during daytime and 140MBit/s at night.

Given that, 500MBit/s downstream is the very minimum one would expect from one of the leading Internet companies, probably located closely to one of speedtest.net's nodes.

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More importantly, Google is one of the world's largest ISPs (practically Tier 1) and maybe the world's largest CDN. The speed of their Internet is quite obviously limited by Speedtest or some artificial limiting, not their lines.

Google's offices wouldn't necessarily have as much bandwidth as their data centers. The real surprise here is that Google gives their offices massive connections (presumably to the GBone).

It's not that unlikely. Consider that the offices may have to push significant amounts of code/data back and forth between their offices and their data centers. You probably want to minimize the amount of developer time wasted.

Consider this question: Let us say the cost of an infrastructure at google HQ is X. X is the cost regardless of internet. Now let us say you have Y which is the price of an average inernet connection for google offices. Or you pay 4 * Y to get that connection. Ok lets make it 10 * Y. Whatever. The point is that if it makes your workers a bit more productive (5000 people?) lets say 3%. I think that 3% productivity on developers translates to WAY above the price of that connection.

I suspect too that there just might have been a fast link between the google and speedtest datacenters, maybe because google earlier rented part of the other dc. A 3 ms ping looks like it must be from a bay area dc to SFO. They should really do an avg of times/bw to other speedtest nodes in US.

It's not from a dc to the speedtest node; its from the campus. It wouldn't matter anyway. I work at Cisco and I have gigabit link to the core from my laptop. Problem is the speedtest nodes can't push the traffic fast enough to fill the pipe which is something I regularly do when working with campuses in MA and NC.

Yeah, sounds possible. So do you see similar numbers from your campus to speedtest SFO as well?

that sounds like an awesome investment, what are you subscribed too?

Ziggo in The Netherlands. Television, telephone, and internet all in one for 67 Euro per month. They have Internet-only subscriptions as well, but the whole package deal is more attractive ;).

Thats cheaper than my 10mbit connection + phone + basic cable in new york.

He must be from Northern Europe. Scandinavian countries have the best deals with internet connections.

As for the numbers, I think 12Mbs is quite an overestimation of reality: http://www.speedtests.net/world/europe/

In the UK the fastest one can go is with Virgin 50MB. Too bad then they force you to use their own cable modem which is a piece of shit.

According to this, Virgin offer 100MB :

http://www.broadband-tv-phone.com/virgin-media-cable-broadba...

100MB is also available in Ireland, through UPC:

http://www.upc.ie/broadband/hundred/ (monthly cost here is roughly double the UK price. Typical! Despite the recession, it's still rip-off republic.)

Virgin 100mb is coming to my area soon :D The schedule for roll-outs across the UK is available here: http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/100Mb-r...

BT are also bringing 100mb broadband in, at which speed I'm sure you'll be able to hit their ridiculously stingy monthly caps in mere minutes.

big difference between MB and Mb but in any case I guess being in America I'm shafted when it comes to internet speeds.

Oops, should have proof-read that...

Here's something interesting - Hong Kong's got 1000Mbps, because the company is question is willing to swallow large losses for years to gain market share. Also mentioned is what it would require for the same to happen in the US -

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/business/06digi.html?_r=2&...

> In the UK the fastest one can go is with Virgin 50MB

. . . well, unless you move to Bradwell Abbey or Highams Park: then you should soon get FTTP at about 100Mbps. An Openreach guy was telling me this afternoon it should just be a few months.

We (Bournemotuth) were due to be getting Fibrecity, 100mb to the home but it looks like they switched on a few roads, dug up a whole lot more then tanked. There original big fanfare plan was to route the fibre through the sewer system rather than digging up the streets again...doesn't seem that panned out too well!

Reports (I blogged about it) had the first FTTP Plusnet customer connected in July 2010 at "between 67.2Mbps and 92.37Mbps".

If the service is as good as it is for Virgin 50Mb I really would not recommend it to anyone.

Yeah. I was expecting multi-deca-gigabits at the very least.

The bandwidth each computer has access to is almost certainly not the entire bandwidth that Google gives its employees access to - if so, the per person bandwidth would be quite low.

Of course, not being a Google employee, I wouldn't know for sure.

Why, exactly, would a consumer NIC be faster than 1Gbps? I'm sure the MV campus bandwidth consists of a ton of fiber directly to the core. They probably give everyone all the bandwidth they can stomach--no one could generate that much traffic, even if they wanted to.

Of course, the bandwidth is limited to gigabit (probably) to the desktop, or less if the OS/Hardware can't handle it. And I'm sure they limit bandwidth for users... imagine a PC infected with a virus, or bit torrent left running, if everyone had full gigabit upload speeds.

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