

The real connection speeds for Internet users across the world (charts) - ukdm
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/12/real-connection-speeds-for-internet-users-across-the-world/

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sh1mmer
This isn’t actually “speed” though, is it? It’s bandwidth. Google’s Mike
Belshe released data this year showing that network latency rather than
bandwidth had a greater affect on the speed of browsing. I’d be very
interested to see how each country lines up in terms of network latency, both
in country (to popular sites) but also to the rest of the world.

~~~
shaddi

        network latency rather than bandwidth had a greater affect on the speed of browsing
    

This has been well-known for a while. I present to you the TCP throughput
equation:

<http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3448.html#sec-3.1>

The fundamental reason for this result is that the rate that TCP's congestion
control algorithm increases the congestion window is tied to round trip time.
Congestion window determines how many packets can be "in the air" at any given
time, and starts from 1-3 packets in modern OS's.

Moreover, packet loss dramatically reduces TCP performance, and this can
happen whenever traffic traverses a congested router along its path: once the
router queue is full, packets get dropped, and your congestion window is cut
in half and grows slowly afterwards. It might be surprising to some, but the
effect of queueing delays can often dominate the effects of propagation delays
due to the physical distance that a packet has to traverse.

I know this type of measurement study has been done numerous times; I'm
blanking on more recent ones but I know for instance the Rocketfuel project
[1] from 2002 did perform large-scale Internet measurements that included link
latencies from various vantage points on the network.

[1] <http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/networking/rocketfuel/>

~~~
sh1mmer
John Rauser did an awesome session on Slow Start at Velocity this year.

Steve did an awesome write up
([http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/13/velocity-tcp-
and...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/13/velocity-tcp-and-the-
lower-bound-of-web-performance/))

Google have a really good (in my opinion) initiative to aggressively open up
the initial window. Their suggestion is to move from from 4 initial packets to
10.

Really though I think there needs to be some process to assess the right size
of the "magic numbers" in TCP periodically without having to redraft/rewrite
whole RFCs.

~~~
shaddi
I mean, in reality TCP congestion control just isn't designed for today's
Internet. We live in a world of huge bandwidth-delay products and short
connections, the opposite of what was the case when Van Jacobsen proposed it
almost 30 years ago (to be fair, it's pretty damn impressive that his basic
idea has prevented congestion collapse from recurring despite decades' worth
of network evolution). Google's position on window size definitely makes sense
in that regard but the very existence of "magic numbers" would suggest that
there's room for some fundamental improvement. I think there are some really
great ideas in the RCP project [1], which basically uses some information
provided by routers to allow all flows to achieve their maximum steady-state
fair-share allocation within one RTT. Even if it doesn't see the light of day
on the broader Internet, I think it has excellent potential for datacenter
networks.

That's article you linked is a really great summary of this issue; thanks for
sharing that with me.

[1] <http://yuba.stanford.edu/rcp/>

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maxklein
Comparing real population with internet population of the top 10 from that
list --

    
    
      Country   : Population Rank - Internet Population Rank
      China     : 1 - 1
      India     : 2 - 4
      USA       : 3 - 2
      Indonesia : 4 - 16
      Brazil    : 5 - 5
      Pakistan  : 6 - 24
      Bangladesh: 7 - (not on list)
      Nigeria   : 8 - 10
      Russia    : 9 - 7
      Japan     : 10 - 3
    

Japan is the biggest list jumper, Pakistan and area are poorly connected, and
surprisingly, Nigeria is connected almost in proportion to its population.

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turbojerry
But what are the download caps? For example a mere 2GB/month download cap here
in the UK starts at £10 (~16USD), and you won't get unlimited downloads
without having an LLU connection which most of the population does not have
access to, so basing a broadband league table on speed tells only part of the
story.

