The truth about advertised fibre speeds

As with just about any data product (I'm excluding products with a specific international CIR here, for example), the advertised speed is the connection speed you may expect from your premises to the ISPs network. From there, it is going to depend on a lot of factors along the way - your ISPs outbound capacity to where ever your destination is, and the capacity of any upstream providers along the way, as well as congestion at a given time.

Let's look at three simplified examples.

1)
You have a 30/10 connection. Your ISP has a total of 100 customers with a 30/10 connection. For simplicity sake, lets say this is their entire customer base. Your ISP has 2Gbps (2000Mbps) of international capacity. Uh-oh, that means if everyone is trying to connect to international destinatinsn at once, not everyone can get full-speed, even if there are no other bottlenecks along the way! But *most* of the time, not everyone will be doing that. This would be congestion at your ISP, in effect.

2)
Again, you are one of 100 customers with your ISP, all on 30/10 connections. Your ISP has now got 3Gbps of international bandwidth, though, so everyone can go full-speed concurrently, yay! But the server you're connecting to only has 100Mbps capacity, and there are 50 other people all trying to connect to it. You're unlikely to get your 30Mbps speed, even though your ISP is no longer a bottleneck. But your ISP has no control over this remote server, or their capacity. Congestion at the far end.

3)
Same scenario as above, 100 customers, 30/10, 3Gbps bandwidth. But this time, the issue is that your connection is going through an upstream provider in, say, California, who has 3Gbps of capacity as well, but has 100 customers all with 100Mbps connections, all using it. Even though the server you're trying to get to has 100Mbps capacity, and noone using it, you're going to be limited by this intermediate hop that's congested. Bottleneck!

So, it really depends. I must say, personally, if speeds across the board to international locations are poor (rather than to specific locations or services), it may be a lack of international capacity from your ISP (though I understood Orcon had addressed this recently, so I'd be surprised if it's the problem), or more likely from one of their upstream providers. Perhaps there's some poor routing choices going on (Routing traffic Auckland -> Sydney -> Perth -> Hong Kong -> California, for example - and which I saw recently -, seems a bit long-winded).

I've just done a test to the Speedtest.net server in Alkmaar, as per your link, and only getting 2Mbps down and 0.4Mbps up. On a 30Mbps connection also (but not with Orcon). I get 3.3/7.8 on our 100/100 connection.

But try Sydney or California. They'll be miles better.

toaster:
National bandwidth is of no interest to me, it would represent about 0.001% of my internet needs.

If guaranteed international speeds are your requirement, I'd have to say you may want to look a a business-grade connection with international CIR to some key locations. $$$.

toaster

Inphinity