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w1ntermute

What speed does this actually mean? 100/100?

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It means it feels ridiculously fast for websites inside the GFW.

speedtest.net results just run now (I'm in Shanghai, it's saturday morning, no VPN):

Shanghai-based server: ping 27ms, down 15.33Mbps, up 0.54Mbps

Beijing-based server: ping 31ms, down 17.49Mbps, up 0.55Mbps

London (UK)-based server: ping 270ms, down 6.17Mbps, up 0.56Mbps

I live in an older compound, my building has 12 floors, most of the others have 6, so this is not a new compound by any means, but we already have fiber, they're rolling it out gradually throughout the city.

> down 15.33Mbps, up 0.54Mbps

That doesn't seem that fast to me. I get better speeds out in the Midwest in America, where internet is supposed to be super shitty.

Particularly, I was expecting a symmetric connection.

This is actually pretty good for inside the GFW; keep in mind links are typically overloaded to the resource you are accessing, its not just about your final leg speed. So fiber really only fixes one part of the connection, Amdahl's law still applies.

Oddly enough, I actually sometimes find sites outside the GFW are a bit faster compared to some domestic Chinese sites inside the GFW. The internal Chinese internet just has lots of problems that they haven't worked through yet.

Correct. I added the day and time for reference, in the evenings during the week, the internet speed can be rated as "lol" in both directions.

w1ntermute, I'm fully aware those speeds are most definitely not fast, but relatively speaking it's usually worse than that.

(I love going to South Korea, I land at Incheon, there's free WiFi in the coach to the city, and the internet is FAST)

> keep in mind links are typically overloaded to the resource you are accessing, its not just about your final leg speed. So fiber really only fixes one part of the connection, Amdahl's law still applies.

Is the last mile not the bottleneck in China? It is in America, AFAIK.

Not when you are watching "Gangnam Style" on Youku. Anything video will be blocked in America anyways, so its Chinese sites only for that. It is true that I can't really do Apple to Apple comparisons.

> Not when you are watching "Gangnam Style" on Youku.

Why is this? Do the ISPs not have caching systems in place?

For streamed video? I don't even think that is possible. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

Of course it's possible: http://netequalizernews.com/2010/10/26/enhance-your-isp-offe...

> To ensure better performance, my Internet provider keeps a local copy of the popular YouTube content (caching), and when I watch a trending video, they send me the stream from their local cache. However, if I request a video that’s not contained in their current cache, I’m sent over the broader Internet to the actual YouTube content servers.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of American ISPs have cached Gangnam Style. In the US at least, Google/YouTube likely assists in this process.

True, that is quite good inside the GFW. As a comparison, I am in Beijing in an apartment from 2002, with a DSL connection that China Unicom sells as 4Mbps (the best I could buy here):

Beijing ping - 26ms down - 2.53Mbps up - 0.53Mbps

Shanghai ping - 148ms down - .83Mbps up - .52Mbps

London ping - 410ms down - .19Mbps up - .15Mbps

Try San Francisco. From Beijing there is usually a good connection to the west coast, better than to Europe.

Thanks, Sean. I was using London so my results would be comparable to the parent's.

It depends how much you pay. I'm in a city 180km from Shanghai and switched to optical fiber recently with no extra charge. I have a plan of 7Mpbs including TV and internet with price of around 200 dollars equivalent per year. They have 20Mpbs plan but the price is different. The internet connection is still 4Mbps as I tested. The TV is much better than before. In Canada I use cable service, with the same speed I pay 50 dollars per month.

There are different service levels. It goes up to 100mpbs/100mbps symmetrical connection. In my case living in Nanjing I pay for a 50mbps/50mbps connection to save a little money.

Inside of the firewall it's basically an instant load for everything. Foreign sites are definitely slower but still feel pretty speedy overall. Without the firewall I imagine the speeds would be really incredible.

100 Mbps is pretty much the minimum speed for fiber; gigabit is not much more expensive. ISPs may offer lower-speed plans, of course.

Tell that to New Zealand then, we're in the process of doing (what appears like a bit of a mess of) a fibre rollout here. All the plans are 30/10 with the "premium ones" being 100/50.

That's the internet plan, not the physicality of the link; I have an (absolutely awesome for the US, still shit in my opinion) 35/10 plan from Frontier in the suburbs of Seattle, but the physical link is 100M, they throttle it at the switch.

In the UK most fibre is to the street with ADSL over copy for the last bit. I get 40/20 from that. I presume the street gets gigabit.

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