NZ speed vs USA

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › NZ speed vs USA

MadamButterfly

9 posts

Wannabe Geek

#26112 12-Sep-2008 09:24

Hello all

I'm living in Russell, NZ but last week was in the USA (various locations). I am amazed at how slow broadband is here, having used it in hotels and airports and private homes while travelling around the USA.

Can anyone give me any statistics please?

I'm in Russell, Bay of Islands, and my provider is orcon.

michaeln

238 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#163956 12-Sep-2008 10:22

Have you optimised your settings for high latency?

An inescapable difference between New Zealand and North America is the high latency caused by the distance, which in turn depends on the speed of light. When you transfer something like a web page from the US, there is a REQUEST - SEND INFORMATION - ACKNOWLEDGE sequence. In fact, that's REQUEST -(delay)- SEND INFORMATION -(delay)- ACKNOWLEDGE and that means that your download speed depends much more on the delay than on the bandwidth. You can alleviate this however by sending larger chucks of information between ACKs (which is a simplification of what actually happens).

The actual formula is:

BW_bps = 8 × RWIN / RTT

(Where BW is the bandwidth, in bytes/sec, RWIN is the Receive Window Size, in bytes, and RTT is the Round Trip Time, in seconds).

To fix this on Windows XP

REGEDIT
  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
 "GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize"=dword:00039fbc

Which sets the RWIN to 237500 bytes, which should be enough for most speeds and most places.

I'm assuming that you are using Windows XP. I'm also assuming that other things have not gone wrong. It may be that the upstream links are congested, or that your broadband connection is actually slow, but I'm betting that the Registry tweak will help.

MadamButterfly

9 posts

Wannabe Geek

#163960 12-Sep-2008 10:46

Hello Michael

Thanks for this. Perhaps it would have been easier if I hadn't gone overseas, ROFL.

I am using Orcon, and have had a one hour session on the phone with them anyway, as the connection keeps going down - so perhaps that is the problem. Hopefully we can resolve that.

I'm using Vista. Will keep you informed. Orcon are sending out a tech.

At one point they told me they didn't support uploading of photographs to the internet, can you believe that? "Just email and browsing". Now that's a totally new approach to using the internet...

Jacqui

xurizaemon

153 posts

Master Geek

#163965 12-Sep-2008 11:09

MadamButterfly:
At one point they told me they didn't support uploading of photographs to the internet, can you believe that? "Just email and browsing". Now that's a totally new approach to using the internet...

Sounds like they need to get an extra network of tubes fitted. The old ones might be in imperial sizes, and not be able to fit digital images through them.

I've had good experiences of Orcon as an ISP, but I did find that my impression of their support team took a dive over the last two or three years. A real pity. Eventually I moved back to ihug, and I've been pretty pleased since.

Jacqui, please visit https://www.speedtest.net and run a test against the pyramid in San Francisco. When it's complete, you can click the "COPY" button next to "direct link" and use the image button in the post editor to post your result back here.

Here's what I get (Ihug, based in Piha).

You might do well to ask in the Orcon forum. Note that there's a HUGE thread there about Orcon's international speeds. It might help you to start a separate thread for each of your questions, though:

1. Why is NZ broadband so horribly, horribly slow?

2. My Orcon connection is drop-tastic. How can I fix this?

(Not technical terminology.)

MadamButterfly

9 posts

Wannabe Geek

#163966 12-Sep-2008 11:20

Oh, so it's the fact that photographs are rectangular in shape? They're catching on the tubes? :-)

San Francisco test

Earlier test this morning (with Orcon techy using Auckland server)

with Auckland test

There's quite a lot of difference, but not sure if it means anything to me (I'm better with butterflies!)

Strangely, it's behaving itself since I had a talk with the Orcon tech an hour ago.

pistolpower

139 posts

Master Geek

#165208 17-Sep-2008 22:14

I think that someone needs to come up with a reasonable pricings policy for broadband so that no one needs to be shaped. I think that the shapping only comes in really when youre using overseas sources. Basicly a base connection fee like what we pay now would be part of it. This would cover there more fixd monthly bills in relation to having a custermor. Then they need to have free local data usage. But charge for internationaly data usage as they pay for pipe bandwidth and they would like extra revenue. And as long as where paying for international then no one needs to get hurt and shaped or routed all funny like. The data fees shouldnt be that hurrendous and youre $ per gb should be derived from your total usage. This would enshure that light users still pay something and that heavy users who allready pay alot dont get hurt. And then counting stuff that is hosted or cached by the isp as local content that doesnt get charged per GB would be cool.

As long as the isps are geting a good deal while offering me a good service at a reasonable price il be happy. It all comes down to network management, companys being nice, people geting what they want for a reasonable price, geting what they pay for and everyone being happy. Really this whole neat nutrality thing is absoloutly pathetic. I belive that if you have a 25mbps connection that you should be able to download at 25mbps. But most of the time you would be lucky to get half of that. It is pretty lame that the isps do what they want to do. They should just stop this crazines.

pistolpower

139 posts

Master Geek

#165210 17-Sep-2008 22:17

Oh god i hope those results where adsl1. I just saw them and theyre horible. I can get 700KBps downstream and 100KBps upstream on adsl1 with xnet to a auckland speed test server.

eXDee

4032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#165225 17-Sep-2008 22:57

pistolpower: I think that someone needs to come up with a reasonable pricings policy for broadband so that no one needs to be shaped. I think that the shapping only comes in really when youre using overseas sources. Basicly a base connection fee like what we pay now would be part of it. This would cover there more fixd monthly bills in relation to having a custermor. Then they need to have free local data usage. But charge for internationaly data usage as they pay for pipe bandwidth and they would like extra revenue. And as long as where paying for international then no one needs to get hurt and shaped or routed all funny like. The data fees shouldnt be that hurrendous and youre $ per gb should be derived from your total usage. This would enshure that light users still pay something and that heavy users who allready pay alot dont get hurt. And then counting stuff that is hosted or cached by the isp as local content that doesnt get charged per GB would be cool.

As long as the isps are geting a good deal while offering me a good service at a reasonable price il be happy. It all comes down to network management, companys being nice, people geting what they want for a reasonable price, geting what they pay for and everyone being happy. Really this whole neat nutrality thing is absoloutly pathetic. I belive that if you have a 25mbps connection that you should be able to download at 25mbps. But most of the time you would be lucky to get half of that. It is pretty lame that the isps do what they want to do. They should just stop this crazines.

People don't understand bandwidth is very expensive, and sometimes must be purchased months in advance. Xnet said that their broadband makes hardly any profit compared to the other services they provide - the margins are very low.

Not shaping, but prioritisation based on traffic type in my opinion is necessary. Things like gaming and VoiP should take priority over P2P, because the former two are latency sensitive. P2P can choke all other bandwidth types, demonstrated at 12AM every night by Xnet's torrent plan, HTTP speeds instantly drop and pings skyrocket due to the no prioritisation or throttling which xnet doesnt use.

Free local/national data leads to exploitation, back when Xnet did it people setup proxy servers and national P2P networks, which still costs the ISP even though they provide it free of charge.

The speed you get is based on your line distance for ADSL, the bandwidth available, the number of people using the net, and what these people are doing (500 users using torrents vs 500 users using voip, its obvious which uses up more bandwidth) and heaps of factors. It's simply impossible to guarentee any connection speed, and for international apart from the purchase of bandwidth a lot of it is out of the ISP's hands. You can't expect to get as fast here as they do in the USA - there simply isnt a great enough population to justify the infrastructure, and many websites are hosted in the USA, hence being faster.

It would be nice to catagorise internet services with all other services, and that the quality should be high as described in the CGA and what you'd expect, but there are simply too many variables to make sweeping generalisations and expecting exactly what is advertised.