Want a faster internet connection? Try moving to another country!

reply to post by ArMaP


I just did the test at speedtest.net... and the results made me sad . My download speed is at 5.21 mbps and upload speed in 0.71 mbps and I live on the west coast of the states. I guess depending what region you are in you may not get the average speed as well.

reply to post by Stop-loss!


The problem is that many things affect the connection speed, that's one of the reasons I get used to use the Internet on Saturday morning, it was the best time when I used a dial-up connection and 33.6 modem.

You may find that if you repeat the test at a different time you will get a different result.

Here in Portugal, the ISPs offering fibre connections directly to the customer's home all advertise, at least, a 100MB connection, but in the small letters they say that that speed is only between the client and their own servers, because they cannot guarantee the speed outside their network.

What a joke the UK came 35th, guess the days when Britania Rules The Waves is long gone eh?
I pay for a 20Mbit connection! Ive never seen a torrent top more than 1.5Mb a sec. My speed test says i get 10Mbit which i really dought.

The thing that bugs me about my internet connection package is the fact that i am paying the same monthly tarrif as someone else,who is probably getting 10x the speed that i am getting!

Tarrifs should be set on how well the internet service is in your own area!

And i'd trade with ANY of you.. here's a very disturbing rundown of what i pay for

Speeds are about (on average) 300KB/s they advertise its 1.5M.. im yet to see anything like that.. EVER
Its pre-paid and the data plans are (in AU$) 1g - $30 / 2g - $40 / 3g - $50 and upwards

Why am i on this you ask, simple.. its all there is where i live, the lines just wont take the signal, exchanges are over 30-40 years old. A few years back i had ADSL2 here but after a severe storm (sydney's big super cell a few years ago) my line was hit and my connection literally severed from the pole, they then tried to hit me for the repair.. i didn't play the game and was left with no connection.. and still have no fixed connection to the outside world.

After 4 months of back and forth with the ISP/telco including some serious debates about legality's with higher ups and not just phone staff.. i was told "we have no account by that name sir.. would you like to start an account with us?" even though they were still trying to sting me for 2 months line rental... with no line.. fun times

So yeah.. I envy YOU ALL

Australia.. the luck country.. unless that is you live outside of the capital city's and want decent internet..

Moldova at number 13 is the poorest most densely populated country in Eastern Europe. It is primarily an agricultural country and the internet speed just rocks.

High speed internet... with a wireless cigarette lighter size modem at $15.00 a month! Miserable internet here in the states at more than twice the cost.

The main question is: Unless you're a dirty pirate stealing media, what do you need such fast connections for? Something like 10Mbps are enough even to download bought games on Steam. Heck, i only have 3 Mbps and had no problems downloading the behemoth that Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition (24 gigabytes) is

Originally posted by ShadowAngel85
The main question is: Unless you're a dirty pirate stealing media, what do you need such fast connections for? Something like 10Mbps are enough even to download bought on Steam. Heck, i only have 3 Mbps and had no problems downloading the behemoth that Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition (24 gigabytes) is

Not just downloading but online gaming as well. Most of the time I fall victim to very slow connections and my performance in COD BO makes me angry . At less then 6 mbps I can hardly be considered a media pirate at all.

reply to post by ShadowAngel85


First of all, downloading is not illegal in Portugal.

Second, downloading photos from Mars takes a lot of traffic (and disk space).

Originally posted by Stop-loss!
Not just downloading but online gaming as well. Most of the time I fall victim to very slow connections and my performance in COD BO makes me angry

. At less then 6 mbps I can hardly be considered a media pirate at all.

Most online games don't need very fast connections because all people in the world must be able to play it with a decent Ping. So you don't need 20 Mbps. If your Ping sucks, it has more do with Interleaving being active, set to 1 and therefore only sending one data package at a time, which are also CRC-checked. Just order your provider to disable that useless crap (most of the time it's called Fastpath) and you get a great ping. Could also other reasons, bad quality Online provider, bad Wireless connection, bad cables if wired connection and one should play only on servers stationed in his country of course.

But then again i remember playing Counter-Strike without fastpath and a 1Mbps connection on an american server. My ping was something like 180 ms and i still owned most of the guys

Originally posted by kn0wh0w

I'm on a 100Mbit connection here in washington state.. it's $199 a month though..

are you serious?

ROFL.

i've got a 50Mbit connection, here in the netherlands, 45 euros a month...

200 dollars

I had no idea such speeds existed.... For any price... here, ISP's brag about 10 being a good thing...

Meh.... I feel ripped off...

What do I have? a download speed of just over 1 MB/S and an upload speed of .37 !!!

reply to post by andy06shake


bit and byte are 2 thing !
1 bytes= 8 bits
www.beesky.com...

Originally posted by choppedbrisket
This is one of those dirty little secrets not publicized because it would destroy
the fragile egos of us Americans.

It's not a "secret", infrastructure and the whole large country of the US cannot be compared to tiny, European countries. It's no big deal to upgrade most cables in a tiny country to fiber etc. or equip with DSL ...but it's a big deal to completely modify all this in a country as big as the US...

There are a few places in the US with truly awesome high speed internet at cheap rates.

For example, Lafayette Lousiana has insanely good, cheap internet. They got it by successfully setting up a high quality municipal internet system, the sort that the telecoms fight tooth and nail to destroy.

Lafayette, Lousiana has better internet at more reasonable rates than most major cities in the US.

Originally posted by flexy123
It's not a "secret", infrastructure and the whole large country of the US cannot be compared to tiny, European countries.

Nope, that is not the problem. If that were the case, our dense areas wouldn't be behind as well. Even our dense cities/states/regions lag behind. New Jersey has a higher population density than the Netherlands and still lags.

What we have is a regulatory mess where we all get massively ripped off compared to everywhere else in the world(edit: clarification: everywhere else we should be compared to).

It hurts our business competitiveness too, obviously. The market has been rigged by lobbying and surprise, it is failing us.

ive used speedtest.net for a few years , i think my record is about 5mbps, but its usually about 3mbps, which is good enough for me. aslong as i dont have to buffer vids i dont really care.
what i do care about is ping/latency (speed).i dont care about mbps, i want faster ping!

The thing is, we're missing out on things we don't even know about yet. There are major benefits, business ideas, etc that could be done with much faster internet. We could have it with a competitive i.e. non-rigged market. We could even do better with a state based aka utility type approach

Extremely fast internet = extremely low cost bandwidth.

Telecommuting would be extremely practical when dirt cheap and reliable video calling was always available, and it would save the country a lot of money on fuel.

Every basic website like ATS would be a lot more profitable because their bandwidth costs would drop to a small fraction of their current costs.

And for the sort of stuff that is hard to anticipate...have you heard of OnLive? OnLive is a video game ~rental company with a service that is hard for people to believe. Gamestop is so scared of them they ripped open copies of Deus Ex II and removed a coupon that let you try OnLive for free. And they then basically gave everybody a $50 coupon to say they were sorry.

OnLive is crazy. You can have a crappy PC and play a game at it's highest possible graphical quality. Their computers do the processing, yours is just you watching the video and sending the commands. You just need a very fast internet connection to make it work or the lag in sending commands to OnLive is too much to be playable.

Originally posted by Stop-loss!

Originally posted by alienreality
I'm on a 100Mbit connection here in washington state.. it's $199 a month though..

A 45Mbit connection used to cost 20k per month about 10 years ago..

edit on 7-10-2011 by alienreality because: (no reason given)

The sad thing about this is I live near the projects so my connection can't go faster then 6 MBPS. I would most likely pay that price as well if it was available in my area but still I suppose the providers have their reasons for limiting this kind of service to those who live in poverty.

Heh, you guys need to mind your B's and b's.... HUGE difference. 6Mbps is COMPLETELY different than 6MBps. 6MBps is about 50mbps, so, if you have 6MBps in the projects.... that's pretty nice considering I only have access to 12mbps connections through DSL at the moment and I'm in a decent suburban neighborhood.

Originally posted by gabbermatt

Originally posted by Stop-loss!

Originally posted by alienreality
I'm on a 100Mbit connection here in washington state.. it's $199 a month though..

A 45Mbit connection used to cost 20k per month about 10 years ago..

edit on 7-10-2011 by alienreality because: (no reason given)

The sad thing about this is I live near the projects so my connection can't go faster then 6 MBPS. I would most likely pay that price as well if it was available in my area but still I suppose the providers have their reasons for limiting this kind of service to those who live in poverty.

Heh, you guys need to mind your B's and b's.... HUGE difference. 6Mbps is COMPLETELY different than 6MBps. 6MBps is about 50mbps, so, if you have 6MBps in the projects.... that's pretty nice considering I only have access to 12mbps connections through DSL at the moment and I'm in a decent suburban neighborhood.

I use to live in Texas before and I feel your pain. Living off of the connection on an army base in El paso made me wish we had better options at the time. Especially when people would try and take your connection as well.

reply to post by Stop-loss!


Nope, I'm about as secure as a normal civilian can be. I use a 128 bit encryption and change my WPA key weekly. I also run a utility called Backtrack5, which is a Linux OS loaded with security tools to monitor my network's security as I know that it only takes about 3 hours to break my password if the assailant knows what they are doing, and has the right tools.

My problem is that the cap on my download allotment is way too low for what my household and I have been using for years. It seems as if the ISP's in my area have reached some kind of agreement with the entertainment industry to limit the bandwidth of "power users" so that they can't use their connections for file-sharing as effectively. In Europe, they care quite a bit less about "copyright infringement", that is likely why you don't see them giving two shakes of a willie about connection speeds or download amounts.

Edit to add: After reading your reply again, I think you misunderstood my post. What I was saying is that my connection speed is great, but it doesn't make a difference if my ISP limits how much data I can transfer in a one month period. I'm currently limited to 250GB a month. It used to be 400GB. I wonder what it will be in a year... All I'm getting at, is speed doesn't matter, if you can only use it for short bursts.

29.84 for me in the U.S.

If you have a bandwidth cap in the U.S. Switch providers. Do not allow companies to think they can get away with it. As soon as AT&T started their caps I switched. I may pay a little more a month but it's worth it.