UFB speed test from Europe to NZ

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ScuL

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#129259 9-Sep-2013 08:54

Kia ora

Quick explanation of the background behind this request.

When moving to New Zealand I'm looking to install a Slingbox either in the UK or The Netherlands in order to stream European TV across the internet.
The device works with a minimum speed of 600kbit but comfortably streams HD (LQ) at 2mbit, and HQ HD at 4mbit.

It will be likely that I'll have a UFB connection on the NZ side (in 2015 most of Auckland should be sorted I hope)
On the European side I will either have a UK Virgin Media (120mbit down/5mbit up) or Dutch Ziggo (60mbit down/6mbit up) -> upstream being most relevant obviously..

What I'm keen to find out is what the average expected bitrate would be from the UK to NZ when using a UFB connection kiwi-side.
I have attempted some speedtests through speedtest.net from the UK (Virgin connection) and came to a maximum of 1100kbit throughput.

Is there anybody that would be willing to experiment by opening up an FTP server (or connecting into mine) in order to find out what the average speed would be?
Prefer somebody on UFB in the Auckland region but any help is welcome!

Cheers

Haere taka mua, taka muri; kaua e wha.

sbiddle

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#891902 9-Sep-2013 09:24

The simple answer to this question is that there isn't one. There are many variables that will affect performance.

plambrechtsen

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#891906 9-Sep-2013 09:25

It will depend somewhat on your transport protocol. If it's UDP then it will go as fast as it can and I have seen speeds over 60+mb depending on your backhaul connection.

The limitation you will have is if the streaming / transport is TCP based, if you are using TCP depending on Window size and a number of other factors you don't tend to get more than 4mb from the other side of the world due to how TCP works.

So really you need to evaluate how the packets are going to get to you, and what sort of packets (and FTP is TCP based so that will have the inherit limitation of TCP in it!). Then decide how you are going to do it.

ScuL

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#891911 9-Sep-2013 09:49

plambrechtsen: It will depend somewhat on your transport protocol. If it's UDP then it will go as fast as it can and I have seen speeds over 60+mb depending on your backhaul connection.

The limitation you will have is if the streaming / transport is TCP based, if you are using TCP depending on Window size and a number of other factors you don't tend to get more than 4mb from the other side of the world due to how TCP works.

So really you need to evaluate how the packets are going to get to you, and what sort of packets (and FTP is TCP based so that will have the inherit limitation of TCP in it!). Then decide how you are going to do it.

Thanks that's a valuable insight that I hadn't considered.
I just did some searching and it seems that the device defaults to TCP in order to maintain stability (keyframes/error check packets) but it CAN operate through UDP if direct TCP is not available due to port forwarding issues. It seems that people have operated US to Japan streams and vice versa through UDP but if the connection lags or bugs out it will drop the frames. Through TCP it seems to attempt to resynch and therefore requires a higher bandwidth troughput

What I'm most interested in is the throughput from residential connections, rather than to some data centre (which is what happens through speedtest.net)
It would also be great to do this at different times of the day (EU peak is of course at a completely different hour than NZ peak hour), and most likely traffic will also be slowed down by the hops in between.

I'm actually wondering if EU-NZ packets will follow the route across Asia then Australia or through the US followed by the Pacific

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hio77

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#891993 9-Sep-2013 11:41

i get 3~4 MB/s on a single stream to NL, with the tcpip stack tunned right up to help it, without tuning or window scaling though, you may struggle to get crisp HD. have to consider backhull network too, alot of chance for things to go wrong alone the way.

packets are likely to go via us, do a few tracerts to say, trademe (trademe.co.nz).

do note though, im on VDSL rather than UFB so thoses speeds are close on maxing 39mbit sync.

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Inphinity

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#892007 9-Sep-2013 12:03

There are so many factors involved, to be honest, that as Steve and Peter said above, there's no one answer. Which ISP you're with, which upstream route they take, how congested their international bandwidth is, what the connection at the other end is like, what congestion levels are like on each link along the route...

I've just done a speedtest with speedtest.net to Ookla's Amsterdam server and only got 5.34Mbps. That's megabit, remember, not megabyte, on 30mbps shaped fibre. Same test, from a 100mbps fibre connection with a different ISP, I get 19.24Mbps. Comparatively, on a 60Mbps VDSL connection (with yet another ISP) I'm getting 14.77Mbps to the same target.

In a single-streamed test, I can only get 1.66Mbps on the 30Mbps fibre to a known NL target. Yet again, despite being nowhere near the line speed on that, I get higher throughput (2.93Mbps) over the 100Mbps fibre, or the 60Mbps VDSL (2.61Mbps).

sheldonlendrum

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#892170 9-Sep-2013 15:38

I have a speedtest on my home office connection you can test against, as the others have said, it wont be accurate, but maybe a small amount helpful.

100/50 UFF Connection via KINECT ( www.kinect.co.nz - www.trustpower.co.nz ).

http://home.lendrum.co.nz/speedtest/

hio77

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#892175 9-Sep-2013 16:00

using sheldonlendrums link..

tested from Switch DC (amsterdam, NL)

fair bit of load on the remote machine too. so ild expect on a clean line at both ends, it would be faster.

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ScuL

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#892354 9-Sep-2013 20:30

Thanks for your input, some of the speeds posted seem questionable, maybe if you do it from data centre to data centre whilst excluding the head-end of an ISP 20Mbps seems to good to be true although it would be awesome if it could happen :)

I just ran the link posted and came up with the following result

This is from Virgin UK (residential) during NZ peak hours (9:15 AM UK, 8:15PM NZ)

Traceroute:

Hops go London - US East Coast - US West Coast - Sydney - Dunedin - into NZ (last part is interesting imo)

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dwl

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#892423 9-Sep-2013 22:59

There was some discussion on UFB international speeds earlier this year here. Provided you use window scaling, single threaded TCP performance of 2-3 MB/s seems fairly common but does depend on your ISP and with this distance many other factors in the middle.

I have seen > 100 Mbps on an Orcon UFB connection from Canada (single threaded) and others have seen more on other services but I wouldn't suggest that as a norm. TCP is quite capable of very high speeds but becomes much more sensitive to any loss as the speeds and distance rise and your limitations might even be at the far end rather than towards NZ (although going via Dunedin certainly won't be helping).

raytaylor

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#892452 9-Sep-2013 23:50

ScuL:
Hops go London - US East Coast - US West Coast - Sydney - Dunedin - into NZ (last part is interesting imo)

Many national ISP's in New Zealand dont accurately specify a city or location of the ip address when sending the information to APNIC who issue them the ip addresses.

Eg. A major isp might say we have 50,000 ip addresses, lets just place 10k in auckland, 10k in wellington, 10k in dunedin etc. Then when they actually go to use the ip addresses, they could be anywhere within their network.

As a small ISP, i have most of my ip address blocks simply registered as Napier even though I use them through multiple towns/cities.

Ray Taylor

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dwl

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#892965 10-Sep-2013 22:16

Some further thoughts: When using Ookla speedtest remember that it is usually multi-threaded with speedtest mini using 2 threads and full speedtest up to 8 (depending on how the ISP configures the server). If you are window size limited or simply having to share a slightly lossy connection with everyone else it can make a big difference.

If your application only uses single threading you may not get quite the results indicated by speedtest. There was a reference in the other link I posted about speedof.me which seems to be single threaded and being CDN based might be another way to determine how each segment is working if looking from each end. I suspect that performance with residential at both ends over this distance might not be that great but I hope it works ok.