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Comment by alwaysdoit | Hacker News Reader

I'd like latency as well as speed. A lot of hotels I have been to have really high ping times.

Yes, latency is very important. We found that there is a strong negative correlation between bandwidth and latency (faster connections tend to have lower response times). That's why we decided to focus on speed first. We are planning to add ping testing as well.

I'm sure you guys are on it, but: See apenwarr's 'Blip' for checking latency in the browser: https://github.com/apenwarr/blip

Locked up FF when I tried it.

Really? I've been using it in FF on GNU/Linux since it was announced 2013-04 without any issue (other than switching to a different tab seems to throttle connections). I've got the latest FF 31. What version/OS/graphics do you have?

Got it.

It was NoScript: NoScript set to allow scripts globally and it works, set to disable scripts by default and it freezes FF.

I would expect the very slowest connections to be T1s, which have excellent latency (and reliability) but almost no bandwidth. Then DSL/cable connections, with bandwidth between 5 and 100Mbps. Anything 100Mbps or greater would have fiber, with the correspondingly low latency again.

Having stayed at a couple of the reviewed hotels in Brazil that get a good rating, you would think everything was fine.

But latency is a HUGE problem in Brazil[1], and in probably any country that's far removed from the major backbones.

Yes, I can watch Youtube just fine in Brazil but I can't tell you the number of times that Skype video or other highly interactive apps wouldn't start or conk out because of poor latency.

The public has no comprehension of latency, but it's really important that this gets factored in somehow, especially for places like Brazil that generally have poor latency.

[1] http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Wi-Fi_and_Internet_se...

I am really surprised to hear Brazil is far removed from backbones, being the most populous Latin American county by a massive margin.

Brazil is far from the economic center of the Internet. South Korea, a country with 1/4 of the population of Brazil, is probably better connected because it's on the route to Japan, China, etc.

Brazil's poor latency may be partly explained by the fact that a lot of their connections have to go through the US and Canada:

"The shape of the Internet varies considerably when examining individual regions. In Europe, the majority of cross-border capacity is between European countries, while in Latin America and the Caribbean the majority of international capacity is connected to the U.S. & Canada."[1]

"More than 80% of Africa's and Latin America's international Internet bandwidth connect to cities outside their regions. In the case of Latin America, 60% of the region's interregional capacity connects to a single city, Miami."[2]

Also, because of Brazil's distance from the economic center of the Internet, they probably don't get the advantage of unpaid peering relationships.

[1] http://www.telegeography.com/assets/website/images/maps/glob...

[2] http://www.telegeography.com/assets/website/images/maps/glob...

> South Korea, a country with 1/4 of the population of Brazil, is probably better connected because it's on the route to Japan, China, etc.

Why would proximity to China matter? They probably have the worst internet in Asia (outside of DPRK of course).

Perhaps they are including Hong Kong which has a huge number of cable landings.

Also: censorship and traffic shaping.

I think traffic shaping would be really nice to detect and report. Something that we will explore once we move beyond HTML5 client.

Maybe the site should use something like http://www.pingtest.net/

Which, unfortunately, requires Java.

Only for packet loss testing. If you don't have Java installed in your browser, you get "Pingtest.net requires Java for packet loss testing, but it does not appear to be installed in your browser. Click here for assistance." The ping and jitter tests still work without Java.

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