
How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing. - dannyr
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/03/29/how-fast-is-the-internet-at-google-mind-blowing/
======
ChuckMcM
When 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_newcab...](http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20080225_newcablesystem.html)

[2] [http://gigaom.com/2007/11/18/google-making-its-own-10gig-
swi...](http://gigaom.com/2007/11/18/google-making-its-own-10gig-switches/)

[3]
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028095.500-ultrafast...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028095.500-ultrafast-
fibre-optics-set-new-speed-record.html)

[4]
[http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/4253...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/4253628)

~~~
forensic
While on the topic of YouTube... why does YouTube constantly buffer these
days?

~~~
mahyarm
Your ISP? Youtube takes 10-20% of typical internet traffic (more than
bittorrent) and competes with telecom TV offerings.

~~~
forensic
My ISP doesn't throttle, which is entirely why I picked them.

I have access to a connection that downloads 20 megabytes per second from S3,
and YouTube still buffers on that connection.

Note that Vimeo doesn't buffer, and Vimeo has higher video quality usually.
Also Netflix doesn't buffer.

YouTube has been getting worse with time rather than better. Tons of ads and
slow video.

The issue is definitely on the YouTube end, and I'm not the first person to
notice it.

~~~
temp7266
> My ISP doesn't throttle

That doesn't mean that they have infinite pipes to Google's edge caches,
though (you're not exactly the only one pulling data through those pipes :-).
Or that they're even pulling their data through the right pipes. I suggest
talking to your ISP. If enough users complain to them, and the problem isn't
in their network, they'll complain to Google.

~~~
irq
It's not just one ISP. I've seen the behavior described by the parent from
multiple ISPs in separate countries. It's been driving me nuts for so long
that I started collecting information about the connections I've seen it from.
Years ago, on 512kbit DSL, it was _MUCH_ better.

PAETEC DS3 (45Mbit/s) in San Diego, CA

Time Warner cable modem in San Diego, CA (20Mbit/s)

Colocation at AmericanIS.net (1Gbit/s via Level3.net) in San Diego, CA

Videotron DSL in Montreal, QC (10Mbit/s)

Teksavvy DSL in Montreal, QC (10Mbit/s)

AT&T 3G in San Diego, Detroit, Atlanta (varies)

Verizon 3G in San Diego (varies)

Rogers 3G in Montreal, QC (varies)

------
danieldk
_Now, 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.

~~~
kin
that sounds like an awesome investment, what are you subscribed too?

~~~
crocowhile
He must be from Northern Europe. Scandinavian countries have the best deals
with internet connections.

As for the numbers, I think 12Mbs is quite an overestimation of reality:
<http://www.speedtests.net/world/europe/>

In the UK the fastest one can go is with Virgin 50MB. Too bad then they force
you to use their own cable modem which is a piece of shit.

~~~
hxa7241
> In the UK the fastest one can go is with Virgin 50MB

. . . well, unless you move to Bradwell Abbey or Highams Park: then you should
soon get FTTP at about 100Mbps. An Openreach guy was telling me this afternoon
it should just be a few months.

~~~
mcdowall
We (Bournemotuth) were due to be getting Fibrecity, 100mb to the home but it
looks like they switched on a few roads, dug up a whole lot more then tanked.
There original big fanfare plan was to route the fibre through the sewer
system rather than digging up the streets again...doesn't seem that panned out
too well!

------
darrenkopp
Obviously this screenshot was taken before they went over their 250 GB quota
and began to be throttled mercilessly.

------
ANH
Sigh. I invite you to semi-rural America:
<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284417179.png>

I live 20 minutes from one of the largest airports in the country.

------
51Cards
What'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
That 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
It's capped at 1mbps as well, even if you get a good signal.

------
dangrossman
It'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
I 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.

------
ChiperSoft
This 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.

------
Maro
This 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
My 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.

------
draugr
The 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>

------
lutorm
Is the _average_ US home internet connection really 10Mbps?? I find that hard
to believe.

~~~
rbranson
Same. What about all those people still on 1.5-6mbit DSL, or... _shudder_
dialup?

~~~
jrockway
I 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.

------
spiffworks
And 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
Are 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?

~~~
nrbafna
It 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!

------
retube
I 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
What were the rates like, if you can recall?

~~~
retube
To 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 :)

------
moe
Sorry, 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...

------
colinprince
From 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.

------
neworbit
Of course it's fast. They cache the whole thing :)

~~~
riledhel
wget internet ??

------
StavrosK
Am 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
Their ping is 3ms. Pretty latency-free :)

(FWIW, my ping is 450ms)

~~~
StavrosK
Their ping to what?

~~~
dchest
To a server in SF located < 50 miles away.

------
kristofferR
Is 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.

------
ma2rten
Wow, 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>). Back then I though "not bad".
But that a post about something like that would make it the homepage of HN...

~~~
sosuke
Makes me feel like a tortoise by comparison
<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284419120.png>

------
dholowiski
At 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...

------
sliverstorm
I 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.

------
andrewvc
I 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.

------
juiceandjuice
I beat google on Upload to the same server: (316mb down/ 165 up / 3ms latency)
<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284509371.png>

------
u3tech
Good 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

------
kmust
In 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"

------
pbhjpbhj
Came 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/>.

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?

------
mynameishere
I'm more impressed that speedtest's server can push data upstream that fast,
unless I'm mistaken about how the test works.

------
rimantas
530/160? I happen to live in this country: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2011/05/want-super-f...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/news/2011/05/want-super-fast-broadband-try-lithuania.ars)

300Mbps for about $30 a month. Well, I don't have the best plan, so that will
be 100 for ~$20.

------
nt
I get similar speeds at work ( financial company in NYC ). Can't download any
games though :-(

------
daimyoyo
While 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>

------
buckwild
You'd be surprised how much of a productivity bottleneck "slow" internet can
be.

------
rajasharan
I 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.

------
joshu
IIRC 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
Were you on the guest network in Google?

~~~
joshu
No. I worked there for over a year.

------
code_duck
Any 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.

------
ivenkys
It 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.

------
DarkSideofOZ
That's pretty crazy, I get 6Mbit on a good day.

------
jodrellblank
See the recent news about Lithuania, FTTH 10Mb for ~$6/month up to 300Mbps for
~$35/month.

<http://bit.ly/infdfc> (apologies for URL shortener, on mobile).

------
tluyben2
I 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.

------
juiceandjuice
Internet at Stanford comparable.

------
wazoox
I suppose they're making some use of their gigantic caches of the whole web as
a proxy, too?

~~~
phpnode
probably 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)

------
GrandMasterBirt
Internet 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.

------
maratd
That 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>

~~~
calloc
On 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
I 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.

