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Comment by 0xFFC | Hacker News Reader

Right now I am living in third world country, So believe it or not , Imagining internet speed more than 2 mbps is kinda hard for me , So I have question from those have Google fiber or any internet connection with speed more than 100 mbps , Can you download file from torrent ? how much your speed is ? How about ordinary web server's,Do they support download speed more than 30,40 mbps ?

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You don't have to live in a 3rd world country to get 2 mbps. Plenty of places in the US get that kind of speed, where the only non-wireless ISP is liable to be the phone company providing DSL straight out of the 90s.

I have 300/100mbps down/up fiber in Paris. As important as the bandwidth is the latency. Basically it means I do most of my work SSHed (mosh'ed actually) to a cluster and don't notice I'm working from home or the company's network. Streaming plots or even videos for debugging is seamless.

Is there any scientific way for measuring latency ? ping'ing seems kind of stupid for measuring right latency of connection.(Maybe I am wrong and ping is reliable way) .

What about ping seems stupid? It seems really straightforward - send something out and wait for the echo.

One caveat with using ping is that ISPs can very easily prioritize that traffic, so you could see results from ping that you might not see in your application.

Pinging works pretty well, but not perfectly. ICMP echo is treated specially by many "traffic shaping" appliances. Firewalls frequently blanket-drop pings from outside, and sometimes pings are given higher priority to aid in diagnostics.

Usually it's noticeable when this is going on (especially the blocking), so you only need to go to some other solution when you notice this.

Try tcptraceroute for comparison. Or you can eg, open up Wireshark, make a real connection and look at the relative times on packets for a real connection. Ping gives you a starting point, usually "best case".

I usually get 8-9 MB/s file downloads with a 100Mbps connection. I think the speed is actually limited by the laptop's slow HDD.

Considering that 100Mbit/s is 12.5MByte/s, the speeds you're seeing aren't horribly distant from your "up to" speed.

[For reference's sake, 8MByte/s is 64Mbit/s and 9MByte/s is 72Mbit/s

The usual rule of thumb I've seen for incorporating protocol overhead is to divide by 10 instead of 8: a 100Mbps connection can usually download about 10MB/s in practice (over http, scp, rsync, etc).

8-9 MB/s write speed for a HDD is horribly slow.

SSD's are not too expensive these days.

Right now I am living in third world country, So believe it or not , Imagining internet speed more than 2 mbps is kinda hard for me

Being a third-world country is not a handicap to have high internet speed. Fiber is not heavy infrastructure. I live in a messy third-world and we have 100mbs fiber at around $80/month.

For reference the parent is from Tunisia, which is really only third-world in the Cold War sense.

The HDI is 0.72, ranked globally in the "high human development" tier. It is just above China, and slightly below Thailand.

That's true. But it's also true that lot of third world people use about 2 Mbps internet or even less. Mainly they (we?) aren't used to paying a lot for internet and relative to income, it is costlier than in developed countries (due to PPP differences.)

It usually is.

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