Which provider has good international speeds?

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dzh

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#173377 20-May-2015 22:11

I am currently with Orcon, VDSL. Dying to switch, not sure how long the process actually takes, but I am in 200Mbps area.
Looks like options are Vodafone & Snap for full 200 Mbps. Looks like Vodafone is shaping their traffic though.

Is there a benchmark of what providers actually give you?

Perhaps you can post what you are using and speeds to San Francisco & London?

I realize I will never get speeds, but just want to make a good decision here. 100 Mbps will work for me as well.

PeterReader

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#1308909 20-May-2015 22:11

Hello... Our robot found some keywords in your post, so here is an automated reply with some important things to note regarding broadband speeds.

If you are posting regarding DSL speeds please check that

- you have reset your modem and router

- your PC (or other PCs in your LAN) is not downloading large files when you are testing

- you are not being throttled by your ISP due to going over the monthly cap

- your tests are always done on an ethernet connection to the router - do not use wireless for testing

- you read this topic and follow the instructions there.

Make sure you provide information for other users to help you. If you have not already done it, please EDIT your post and add this now:

- Your ISP and plan

- Type of connection (ADSL, ADSL2, VDSL)

- Your modem DSL stats (do not worry about posting Speedtest, we need sync rate, attenuation and noise margin)

- Your general location (or street)

- If you are rural or urban

- If you know your connection is to an exchange, cabinet or conklin

- If your connection is to a ULL or wholesale service

- If you have done an isolation test as per the link above

Most of the problems with speed are likely to be related to internal wiring issues. Read this discussion to find out more about this. Your ISP is not intentionally slowing you down today (unless you are on a managed plan). Also if this is the school holidays it's likely you will notice slower than usual speed due to more users online.

A master splitter is required for VDSL2 and in most cases will improve speeds on DSL connections. Regular disconnections can be a monitored alarm or a set top box trying to connect. If there's an alarm connected to your line even if you don't have an alarm contract it may still try to connect so it's worth checking.

I recommend you read these two blog posts:

- Is your premises phone wiring impacting your broadband performance? (very technical)

- Are you receiving a substandard ULL ADSL2+ connection from your ISP?

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johnr

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#1308922 20-May-2015 22:16

You want 100Mbp/s international on consumer grade internet to San Francisco & London?

Vodafone only does traffic managment on P2P traffic peak time but I am sure you will find one ISP is not that much different from another for international unless you pay up huge $$$ for a managed contract for international traffic,

dzh

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#1308984 20-May-2015 23:54

johnr: You want 100Mbp/s international on consumer grade internet to San Francisco & London?

Vodafone only does traffic managment on P2P traffic peak time but I am sure you will find one ISP is not that much different from another for international unless you pay up huge $$$ for a managed contract for international traffic,

> I realize I will never get speeds, but just want to make a good decision here.

Aredwood

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#1308996 21-May-2015 00:34

San Francisco

Speeds to USA will be hit and miss due to peering arrangements between providers within the USA.

And London

Speeds to London (or anywhere else on the other side of the world) will always be poor due to ping times and the way TCP works.

And a test to Sydney as well

Also some other things to consider between Vodafone and Snap. Vodafone run cache servers (transparent proxy). And there have been previous complaints about their routing. From people saying this causes poor ping times to some game servers. Snap don't have any cache servers. And better routing. Snap have IPv6. Vodafone give you discounts if you have a Vodafone account cellphone. And often sky / netflix discounts / offers.

Most people won't notice the caching or the routing. But there are a few which this causes big problems for. Mentioning all of this because this is a geek site after all.

And Yes im on Snap UFB in Auckland. My router is a Ubiquity Edge Router Lite.

dzh

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#1308997 21-May-2015 00:38

Aredwood, I've got better speed & ping to London on my VDSL :D

michaelmurfy

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#1308999 21-May-2015 00:46

I'm with Snap on a 200/200 connection - they're pretty good in regards of speed:

Speedtest-CLI (because doing this over WiFi sucks)

mmurphy@bulbasaur:~$ speedtest-cli --server 603
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Snap Limited (111.69.153.245)...
Hosted by Unwired (San Francisco, CA) [10894.25 km]: 152.165 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 72.56 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 21.14 Mbit/s

mmurphy@bulbasaur:~$ speedtest-cli --server 2789
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Snap Limited (111.69.153.245)...
Hosted by Vodafone UK (London) [18830.94 km]: 368.978 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 31.29 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 9.51 Mbit/s

Downloading using a download manager:

mmurphy@bulbasaur:/tmp$ aria2c -x 8 http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin
[#e7a600 97MiB/100MiB(97%) CN:1 DL:12MiB]
05/21 00:45:12 [NOTICE] Download complete: /tmp/100MB-fremont.bin

Download Results:
gid |stat|avg speed |path/URI
======+====+===========+=======================================================
e7a600|OK | 12MiB/s|/tmp/100MB-fremont.bin

Status Legend:
(OK):download completed.

mmurphy@bulbasaur:/tmp$ aria2c -x 8 http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin
[#d2f410 99MiB/100MiB(99%) CN:1 DL:7.1MiB]
05/21 00:46:17 [NOTICE] Download complete: /tmp/100MB-london.bin

Download Results:
gid |stat|avg speed |path/URI
======+====+===========+=======================================================
d2f410|OK | 6.6MiB/s|/tmp/100MB-london.bin

Status Legend:
(OK):download completed.

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#1309003 21-May-2015 01:20

From here in Napier to Oslo, Norway (so a little farther than the other side of the planet)

This on a 40/10 Mbit/s VDSL connection

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mercutio

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#1310899 24-May-2015 18:46

just to let you guys know speedtest.net isn't very good for showing international download speeds for distant locations like london. they choose the file size to request based on the speed of the first request, and there just isn't enough time for tcp/ip to ramp up. downloading a 20 megabyte file or such is a better test for "medium" sized downloads. and 200 mb+ for larger. (although the first half is likely to go slower than the second half)

Publius

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#1311292 25-May-2015 13:20

Aredwood:
Snap don't have any cache servers.

Citation needed. My understanding is snap do run a transparent proxy. Whether all http traffic runs thorough it or just some i'm not sure.

ScuL

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#1311331 25-May-2015 14:23

I have conducted some testing to check which bitrates I could use for streaming European TV to NZ
See my results here

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=49&topicid=161719&page_no=3#1220468

Haere taka mua, taka muri; kaua e wha.

dzh

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#1312237 26-May-2015 19:51

mercutio: just to let you guys know speedtest.net isn't very good for showing international download speeds for distant locations like london. they choose the file size to request based on the speed of the first request, and there just isn't enough time for tcp/ip to ramp up. downloading a 20 megabyte file or such is a better test for "medium" sized downloads. and 200 mb+ for larger. (although the first half is likely to go slower than the second half)

I actually noticed that at work. The test was done way too fast.

Good point.

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mercutio

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#1312242 26-May-2015 20:13

dzh:
mercutio: just to let you guys know speedtest.net isn't very good for showing international download speeds for distant locations like london. they choose the file size to request based on the speed of the first request, and there just isn't enough time for tcp/ip to ramp up. downloading a 20 megabyte file or such is a better test for "medium" sized downloads. and 200 mb+ for larger. (although the first half is likely to go slower than the second half)

I actually noticed that at work. The test was done way too fast.

Good point.

yeah it's kind of annoying, because it's useful to test international speeds to various locations. it tends to behave a lot better with the US than Europe.. And there are some contributing factors.. About 4 years ago I could get 16 megabit on UK speedtest.net on ADSL by proxying my traffic. Which is one way to improve the performance..

TCP/IP can actually ramp up quicker than most people realise - on a good connection you should be able to get 200 megabit within seconds..

but seconds at 200 megabit is still 60mb+ ..

one thing that seem to be common is file transfers going faster ... than cutting out and going slower, due to suddenly getting more errors when trying to go too fast..

and so there's "streaming performance" ie - can you stream at 10 megabit, raw performance which includes time taken to get up to speed. consistency of performance - which matters both for streaming and raw, sometimes one connection will go fast the next slow, and if you're lucky you'll get a good connection, and if unluckly you'll get a bad one. Which means you have to test single threaded downloads multiple times over.

Streaming performance can struggle especially if it's real time when other users use the internet - so you can test downloading from the UK, and then start a download from a NZ server while it's downloading and see how much it struggles. If you really want to tempt fate you can do a concurrent upload too, or use a download accelerator to a NZ server.

Raw performance, you have to decide if you want to abuse servers and use multiple concurrent connections and a download accelerator or do the friendly thing and use a single connection. If using a download accelerator you can watch out for some connections going much slower than others which matters more for streaming performance than raw performance if you habitually use download accelerators.

if you want to consistently get good UK performance you can hire a VPS in the US and setup a proxy on it and bounce traffic through it - it'll accelerate the time it takes to get up to speed, get higher peak speeds, improve the chances of streaming working well, but it'll also mean you end up with a US IP address. And if you say want to buy another VPS and are using a proxy it'll often flag the connection as billing doesn't match browsing location.

dzh

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#1312246 26-May-2015 20:19

> And if you say want to buy another VPS and are using a proxy it'll often flag the connection as billing doesn't match browsing location.

Wow really?

What if I get NZ VPS? Wouldn't they be serving 'business grade' internet?

mercutio

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#1312249 26-May-2015 20:24

dzh: > And if you say want to buy another VPS and are using a proxy it'll often flag the connection as billing doesn't match browsing location.

Wow really?

What if I get NZ VPS? Wouldn't they be serving 'business grade' internet?

yeah there's heaps of fraud, if you tell them what you're doing they'll probably let it through manually. heaps of fraud with vps's.

i don't think any of the nz vps places are wonderful for international performance with decent bandwidth pricing. i wouldn't bother if I had UFB - just go to the US, and be aware of it... and choose somewhere you can get good speeds from.

you can also improve performance by running traffic shaping on the other end and limiting the upload speed to your ip with the maximum connection speed your connection can do. and balance out multiple connections using sfq or fq_codel. if you're into that kind of thing it's pretty easy to do on linux.

hio77

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#1312273 26-May-2015 20:44

go with snap, their speeds are solid.

i used to regularly get solid 6~7MB/s downloads over single threads from datacenter in Netherlands (TCP/IP stack tuned at the other end ofcourse to help this along)

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