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I’m visiting Australia at the moment and the state of internet connectivity in central Melbourne is pretty poor. Very slow internet at my AirBnBs, generally ve

I’m visiting Australia at the moment and the state of internet connectivity in central Melbourne is pretty poor. Very slow internet at my AirBnBs, generally very poor WiFi availability and speeds in public, the co-working space I’m in (that is otherwise excellent) is a similar speed to my home connection in London. Above all, latency makes some websites considerably less pleasant to use, and SSH to most places is painful. I know that’s not something the local market can necessarily fix though.

isostatic 7y ago
I've thought about working in Aus for a few months over a (northern) winter - what visa did you get?
- danpalmer 7y ago
  I got a regular tourist visa. My main reason for visiting is seeing people, and I'm just doing a bit of remote work for a UK based company during time that I'm not seeing people. I'm not being paid in Aus, still being paid at home in £. I don't believe that counts as "working in Australia". I'm here for 1 month, I think the tourist visa allows you to visit for up to 3 months. This is not visa advice.
koyote 7y ago
As someone who moved to Australia from London, I can confirm: the latency is the real killer. I'm one of the few lucky ones with FTTP which gets me close to 100mbit speeds. But as soon as I have to connect to a server outside of Oz I am pretty much back to (high) ADSL speeds. Latency to the US and Singapore (the two closest international backbones) is around 150-200ms. It's around double that for Europe. At peak times those backbones get very congested. Funnily the only country I've been to that has faster and more consistent 4g was Japan.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  100MB is still not great for business premises. At home in London I'm on 80MB fibre, and get ~76MB during peak times. At work in London we have 1GB (and typically get 1.2GB) between ~80 people. This co-working space is ~85MB for a similar number of people.

isostatic 7y ago

I've thought about working in Aus for a few months over a (northern) winter - what visa did you get?

danpalmer 7y ago
I got a regular tourist visa. My main reason for visiting is seeing people, and I'm just doing a bit of remote work for a UK based company during time that I'm not seeing people. I'm not being paid in Aus, still being paid at home in £. I don't believe that counts as "working in Australia". I'm here for 1 month, I think the tourist visa allows you to visit for up to 3 months. This is not visa advice.

koyote 7y ago

As someone who moved to Australia from London, I can confirm: the latency is the real killer. I'm one of the few lucky ones with FTTP which gets me close to 100mbit speeds. But as soon as I have to connect to a server outside of Oz I am pretty much back to (high) ADSL speeds. Latency to the US and Singapore (the two closest international backbones) is around 150-200ms. It's around double that for Europe. At peak times those backbones get very congested. Funnily the only country I've been to that has faster and more consistent 4g was Japan.

danpalmer 7y ago
100MB is still not great for business premises. At home in London I'm on 80MB fibre, and get ~76MB during peak times. At work in London we have 1GB (and typically get 1.2GB) between ~80 people. This co-working space is ~85MB for a similar number of people.