9 ms·
How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.
- 51Cards 16y agoWhat's funniest is that if you look closely at the Speedtest.Net image, Google only gets a 3 1/2 star rating. No one is ever happy I guess.
- sahillavingia 16y agoThat rating is for Google as an ISP. They provide free WiFi to the city of Mountain View which isn't always fast depending on where you are. That probably accounts for the low rating.
- lawnchair_larry 16y agoIt's capped at 1mbps as well, even if you get a good signal.
- andrewvc 16y agoI usually can't get those kinds of speeds from most of my servers in datacenters generally. Speedtest uses servers in the same city, and game downloads probably do as well (CDNs) but the average case is likely significantly slower.
- wazoox 16y agoI suppose they're making some use of their gigantic caches of the whole web as a proxy, too?
- phpnode 16y agoprobably not, why would they want cached (outdated) content unless a particular site is down? Also, it's not like that content lives in servers in their office, it's in data centres all over the world (presumably)
- nt 16y agoI get similar speeds at work ( financial company in NYC ). Can't download any games though :-(
- maratd 16y agoThat doesn't even make sense. For you to get to those sorts of speeds, you need jumbo frame support. While you can get that taken care of on a LAN/WAN or for Internet2, you can't magically make the Internet support it just by sprinkling Google fairy dust everywhere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame
- calloc 16y agoOn my local lan I am able to get to about 40 MB/sec consistently over a gigabit link, and most of that is limited by the fact that I am reading from my local disk when doing so. Also, the test probably isn't designed for internet connections that fast which could also lead to funky results.
- Osiris 16y agoI have a gigabit network at home and I can get up to 80MB/s, usually over 65MB/s sustained. I tried jumbo frames but due to the variety of different devices, I couldn't get everything working on the same MTU, so I had to drop back to 1500. Still get good speeds.
- joezydeco 16y agoI'm really curious where that speedtest is going, given the 3 mSec ping time.
- darrenkopp 16y agoObviously this screenshot was taken before they went over their 250 GB quota and began to be throttled mercilessly.
- danieldk 16y agoNow, let’s put these numbers into perspective. According to Ookla’s Net Index, the average speed for a country in Europe is around 12 Mb/second. That's partly because most people are happy with such speeds (or at least the speed/price ratio). At home I have a subscription with 120MBit/s downstream. Speed tests usually give 130MBit/s during daytime and 140MBit/s at night. Given that, 500MBit/s downstream is the very minimum one would expect from one of the leading Internet companies, probably located closely to one of speedtest.net's nodes.
- retube 16y agoYeah. I was expecting multi-deca-gigabits at the very least.
- sorbus 16y agoThe bandwidth each computer has access to is almost certainly not the entire bandwidth that Google gives its employees access to - if so, the per person bandwidth would be quite low. Of course, not being a Google employee, I wouldn't know for sure.
- Locke1689 16y agoWhy, exactly, would a consumer NIC be faster than 1Gbps? I'm sure the MV campus bandwidth consists of a ton of fiber directly to the core. They probably give everyone all the bandwidth they can stomach--no one could generate that much traffic, even if they wanted to.
- dholowiski 16y agoOf course, the bandwidth is limited to gigabit (probably) to the desktop, or less if the OS/Hardware can't handle it. And I'm sure they limit bandwidth for users... imagine a PC infected with a virus, or bit torrent left running, if everyone had full gigabit upload speeds.
- DufusM 16y agoI suspect too that there just might have been a fast link between the google and speedtest datacenters, maybe because google earlier rented part of the other dc. A 3 ms ping looks like it must be from a bay area dc to SFO. They should really do an avg of times/bw to other speedtest nodes in US.
- Maro 16y agoThis reminds me of the good old days, the 90s, when I was a teenager and finally upgraded to a ~50KB/s cable modem from my puny 33600 baud modem. That was a game changer, I even ran an FTP server for a while =) It's been getting faster ever since then, but I never again had that feeling of "OMG it's so fast let's download something for the hell of it".
- smhinsey 16y agoMy first job was in that era at my hometown ISP. I got a discount on shotgun modems. We could pirate Doom and Photoshop 3 on the T1. Nothing ever seemed that fast, even now when I have a 35 mbps fios line.
- retube 16y agoI think the fastest connection I ever had was back in the day when I worked at CERN. They host(ed?) a European internet hub, so rates were pretty damn quick.
- siddhant 16y agoWhat were the rates like, if you can recall?
- retube 16y agoTo be honest I can't remember. This was 10 - 12 years ago though so what was absurd then is probably pretty standard now. It was a heck of a lot quicker than the T1 line we had in the Physics dept back in London :)
- m0nastic 16y agoIt's easy to get spoiled. 12 years ago my computer was two hops away from an OC-192 and back then I didn't even have anything interesting to try and download (I think I mostly downloaded SunOS ISO's).
- ma2rten 16y agoWow, I did not realize my internet connection at work is actally that good... I ran speed test before some month ago and it was in the same range. (see http://speedtest.net/result/1147935298.png http://speedtest.net/result/1147935298.png). Back then I though "not bad". But that a post about something like that would make it the homepage of HN...
- sosuke 16y agoMakes me feel like a tortoise by comparison http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284419120.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284419120.png
- StavrosK 16y agoAm I the only one who thought they meant latency? I like my speeds well enough, but I could use some reduced latency. I guess there isn't much one can do about this, though.
- ComputerGuru 16y agoTheir ping is 3ms. Pretty latency-free :) (FWIW, my ping is 450ms)
- lutorm 16y agoIs the average US home internet connection really 10Mbps?? I find that hard to believe.
- rbranson 16y agoSame. What about all those people still on 1.5-6mbit DSL, or... shudder dialup?
- jrockway 16y agoI think most people have cable, which sometimes gives pretty good throughput. I value customer service over raw speed, so I have Speakeasy DSL. It's not the fastest, but it is always up.
- AndrewHampton 16y agoIt's likely the average of people in the US who have run the speed test.
- adamtrilling 16y agoSeriously. I wish I could get 10mbps internet at home...I haven't been able to do so in almost 10 years of living in a very big city and the suburbs of another very major city...
- crocowhile 16y agohttp://www.speedtests.net/world/ http://www.speedtests.net/world/ ~7 in the USA and ~5 in Europe according to speedtests.net
- ANH 16y agoSigh. I invite you to semi-rural America: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284417179.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284417179.png I live 20 minutes from one of the largest airports in the country.
- juiceandjuice 16y agoInternet at Stanford comparable.
- code_duck 16y agoAny of us could have that if we felt OK paying for an OC3 or OC12 connection at your home or office, right? I'm sure plenty of companies and universities have such service.
- mynameishere 16y agoI'm more impressed that speedtest's server can push data upstream that fast, unless I'm mistaken about how the test works.
- rajasharan 16y agoI don't get the point of this post. If the screenshot said MB/s then that was something. My Apt has a corporate internet freely available for the residents and I always get 500 - 700Mbps.
- DarkSideofOZ 16y agoThat's pretty crazy, I get 6Mbit on a good day.
- spiffworks 16y agoAnd now for a bit of perspective, here in India I am working with a 512kbps connection, which is the only one I can get without any 'fair use' caps. The latency for the fastest DNS is about 350ms, and on weekends, my bandwidth can be as low as 200kbps.
- runningdogx 16y agoAre you in a major city or a more outlying area? Is that a wired, or wireless, connection? Even wired access could have wireless backhaul... assuming yours is wired, is that the reason for the slowness, or have they really been mad at work all over India laying conduit with copper instead of fiber?
- vijaykotari 16y agoProbably in an outlying area. I live in Hyderabad, and I get 4 Mbps for ~$55. Sigh.
- nrbafna 16y agoIt is is same all over the country. That's the only plan without any 'fair usage cap'. You might get 4Mbps for $55, but after 15GB of usage, the bandwidth will be cut down for the remaining month. Also, 3G just launched in India. No more than 50 cities have it, and the maximum they can provide is 32Mbps, again with some fair usage cap!
- draugr 16y agoThe Gathering, a large LAN party in Norway had a 100Gbit connection. As one of over 5000 participants, I achieved this: http://speedtest.net/result/1260898925.png http://speedtest.net/result/1260898925.png
- u3tech 16y agoGood but nothing special, i live in lithuania and i download files at 140MBit/s .I am using cheapest my internet provider plan and if i want to pay more i could get faster internet. p.s. i pay 17usb per month
- kristofferR 16y agoIs this really "mind-blowing"? I can upgrade my personal home fiber to 400/400Mbits for 6000NOK (1100USD) per month here in Oslo. Expensive yeah, but not too unreasonable.
- buckwild 16y agoYou'd be surprised how much of a productivity bottleneck "slow" internet can be.
- ChiperSoft 16y agoThis is impressive, but it loses a little luster when you realize their proximity to the testing server. SpeedTest's SF server is hosted by MonkeyBrains.net. A quick traceroute shows their servers are just one step away from Cogent's SF backbone. I suspect whoever ran this test has fewer than four steps between them and the testing server, and the slowest link between them is the gigabit ethernet port to their desk.
- juiceandjuice 16y agoI beat google on Upload to the same server: (316mb down/ 165 up / 3ms latency) http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284509371.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284509371.png
- jodrellblank 16y agoSee the recent news about Lithuania, FTTH 10Mb for ~$6/month up to 300Mbps for ~$35/month. http://bit.ly/infdfc http://bit.ly/infdfc (apologies for URL shortener, on mobile).
- neworbit 16y agoOf course it's fast. They cache the whole thing :)
- riledhel 16y agowget internet ??
- kmust 16y agoIn my experience, it's only relative to the speed of the server that you are connecting to. I have a 20megabyte (not megabit which is a common misconception) circuit but usually can only get 5-8MB of bandwidth on average from the server that I am connecting to. We didn't notice much of a difference when we upgraded from 10MB to 20MB for this reason. We have more pipe to download concurrently but doesn't necessarily mean that the "internet" is going to be "faster"
- dholowiski 16y agoAt my office, we're struggling with a 0.25Mb up connection. What I wouldn't give for a single percent of google's connection speed...
- colinprince 16y agoFrom the University of Toronto campus, all requests to www.google.com go through Canarie, the local hookup to Internet2, I think. This means all my searches are very fast, and also means when our main provider (Cogent) is down, we still have access to google and their web caches.
- rimantas 16y ago530/160? I happen to live in this country: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/want-super-fast-broadband-try-lithuania.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/want-super-f... 300Mbps for about $30 a month. Well, I don't have the best plan, so that will be 100 for ~$20.
- daimyoyo 16y agoWhile this might seem slow, I am using WiMax so this is at the high end of what I usually see. Also my upload is capped at 1MBit/s. http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284650149.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284650149.png
- ChuckMcM 16y agoWhen I read these I'm amused that people are surprised by Google's network. Its actual capability is nominally secret (my employment agreement and exit agreement both mention restrictions on revealing non-public details of Google's infrastructure) Except in this case there many publically available clues which should give you an idea here. Consider that Google is investing in undersea cables [1] which nominally provide multi-terabit speeds between continents. And Google is cheap, really cheap, in terms of what they will pay for infrastructure which is why they started making their own switches [2] because even commodity ethernet vendors weren't cheap enough (although these days of state funded cyber armies one also has to protect against foreign made equipment [4]) What is more the amount of data you can send over a fiber is getting faster all the time [3] so replacing the inter-datacenter lasers can quintuple bandwidth. There have been some interesting 'escapes' of course, once when one of the data centers became unavailable and all the YouTube traffic started coming from another one very far away serving a very large local population, and latencies went up but throughput didn't change, I know a couple of network administrators did a double take on what they were seeing :-) [1] http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20080225_newcablesystem.html http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20080225_newcab... [2] http://gigaom.com/2007/11/18/google-making-its-own-10gig-switches/ http://gigaom.com/2007/11/18/google-making-its-own-10gig-swi... [3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028095.500-ultrafast-fibre-optics-set-new-speed-record.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028095.500-ultrafast... [4] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/4253628 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/4253...
- joshu 16y agoIIRC the internet felt faster in my apartment in Palo Alto (100mbit burstable to town fiber) than on the Google campus. Yahoo's office connectivity was pretty great, though. Maybe they are messing with people?
- vijaykotari 16y agoWere you on the guest network in Google?
- joshu 16y agoNo. I worked there for over a year.
- sliverstorm 16y agoI find faster internet stops meaning anything once I have reached speeds that allow 100MB downloads in less than 30 seconds, and the connection provides < 100ms latency. I am not every user, but I personally find that I only rarely download files larger than 100MB, so anything faster is generally underutilized.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoCame across these sorts of speeds when FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) was first released for domestic use in the UK last year, http://alicious.com/2010/400mbps-internet-via-fttp/ http://alicious.com/2010/400mbps-internet-via-fttp/. For that blog post the writer compared the potential 400Mbps to the 40Mbps of a blu-ray disc. This seems to be a precursor to widespread use of cloud based disc access for general computing with a relatively small SSD buffer?
- tluyben2 16y agoI require stable SSH; I like to listen to the occasional tech podcast or watch some video, but basically I need SSH. So no, not blowing anything here.
- dangrossman 16y agoIt's a bit depressing to think that some day we'll all have connections this fast, but unless we learn to violate the laws of physics, we'll never have single digit latencies around the globe. I like to imagine technology always getting faster, but the speed of light really starts to limit things.
- MartinCron 16y agoI had a site user in the Netherlands insist that he should be getting 10ms response times from our server in Seattle. I told him that in AMERICA we obey the laws of physics.
- JonnieCache 16y agoThere can be only one solution: We must route fibre through the very core of the earth itself!!!
- GrandMasterBirt 16y agoInternet at work: 100mbps download speeds when downloading ubuntu. Its the nature of the game. My company and google both need high speed internet and they will pay for it.
- ivenkys 16y agoIt would be interesting to see if someone from SG or South Korea can chime in - i lived in SG 10 years ago and got 100Mbps downstream consistently.
- moe 16y agoSorry, mind blowing? Plenty office buildings and universities have faster links than that. I could rent an 1 GBit/s fibre to my office for ~3000 EUR/month. Also couldn't he come up with a more meaningful test than a questionable speed-tester site...