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I hope someone has an answer to this. In a lot of places (like Hong Kong or Japan), users are likely connecting to local servers a lot of the time for reasons
by mdasen 17y ago
I hope someone has an answer to this. In a lot of places (like Hong Kong or Japan), users are likely connecting to local servers a lot of the time for reasons of language or geography. So, it's potentially easy for an ISP to offer a high speed to those local servers just like it could be easy for an ISP in Boston to offer high speed access to servers in Boston. However, most Americans would be connecting to servers that are usually far away from them geographically.
My question is, are those Hong Kong users getting 1Gbps access to the internet or a small portion of the internet located within 5 miles of their position? If I had a server in Japan, would they be able to connect at 1Gbps? If I had a server in San Francisco?
I know that when I was in Israel a few months back, access to major sites like Facebook was terribly slow even over a connection that was fast when tested using Speedtest.net to a server within Israel (even accounting for latency).
If that's the case, would you want/accept an American ISP who offered you 100Mbps access to servers within your metro area and much slower speeds to the greater internet? For example, in Boston we have the Northern Crossroads (http://www.nox.org/background/index.html http://www.nox.org/background/index.html) and my ISP could probably easily and cheaply give me very high speed access to servers within it, but that's a tiny fraction of the servers that I'd want to use since, as an English speaker, the servers I'd want to connect to are very spread out. If they moved the bottleneck to 2 hops out, would that be helpful? Would you accept them selling you 100Mbps or 1Gbps internet service that was actually 10Mbps to the greater internet and only that fast to servers nearby? I'm really just musing here and am really interested in people's thoughts on the matter.
Hopefully someone who knows about the situation (like where ISPs costs are, whether it costs more for an ISP to get/build capacity to go across the country for me, whether it's significantly cheaper for my ISP to deliver higher speeds to a nearby server, etc.) can speak to this.
- ww520 17y agoThe ISP only guarantees the 1Gbps speed for outgoing and INCOMING traffic out of your house to their network. It can't guarantee the same speed at any destination servers in the world. If the destination server in US has a slow ISP, you can't get 1Gbps to it. There are also a number of routers and gateways in between your house and the rest of the world. It's worse when going across Continents. They all impact the speed. It's like the ISP forms a 1Gbps-island. When all the islands in the world have gone to 1Gbps and the inter-links between them have beefed up, you will get 1Gbps to anywhere in the world. Keep dreaming.
- ique 17y agoI can speak for Japan and Sweden (which also offers 1Gbps for around 30-40 bucks) and that is 1Gbps over the entire internet, in Sweden there isn't even any commercial restriction from this particular ISP (in Lund), i.e. I could set up a server farm in my apartment and sell space if I wanted. I've only tested 100mbit in Japan (that was free with the apartment) and that was 100mbit to anywhere.
- isleyaardvark 17y agoYes, because I'm guessing that a CDN would want to have a server within a metro area like that, and that would make a big difference.