Internetr speed Inquiry

[Ericke_012]

Good day guys I would like to ask about connection speed, the setting is that in our country internet speed is an issue. My question is that when we check ISP plans we are at 300mbps and when we speed test we have 300mpbs up and down on their own server, but when I use the Oslo Speedtest Server I get half or less than half of the speed they are advertising, their reason is they are using encryption that affects speed when testing servers outside of the country, should this be the case or is this the case for everyone from other countries.

[MrMase]

There is going to be some drop in speed the further away from the test server you are and is also dependent on the capabilities of that server.

Half the connection speed providing it is in a region not terribly far seems a little steep though.

[DoctorNick]

13 minutes ago, Ericke_012 said:

Good day guys I would like to ask about connection speed, the setting is that in our country internet speed is an issue. My question is that when we check ISP plans we are at 300mbps and when we speed test we have 300mpbs up and down on their own server, but when I use the Oslo Speedtest Server I get half or less than half of the speed they are advertising, their reason is they are using encryption that affects speed when testing servers outside of the country, should this be the case or is this the case for everyone from other countries.

This is normal. The further you come from home the slower the speed you get.

[manikyath]

speedtesting outside of the country often runs into bottlenecks on international lines, especially on busy hours.

 

speedtest to whatever independant party that's closest to home. if that comes up as MUCH worse than the ISP's servers, you can assume their peering is just arse, and take that in consideration when the time comes to reconsider which ISP you use.

[wanderingfool2]

33 minutes ago, Ericke_012 said:

their reason is they are using encryption that affects speed when testing servers outside of the country

Well encryption wouldn't really do that.  Data is encrypted on your end and sent to the end server to decrypt.  So at that stage you should get the same results, since testing within the same country would still have the same encryption.

 

The more likely cause those is bad peering.  Are you using speedtest.net as a guide?  What if you pick a different place, do you get full speed?

 

Other considerations can be how far is everything traveling? e.g. If I ran a speed test from Canada to Britain I would likely not get full speeds as it has to travel across Canada, then travel along the under ocean fibre lines to Britain...which then you are limited by the slowest connection along that pathway.  Networks within your country typically are pretty good to each other, but then leaving the country is a different story...as you might have limited bandwidth outside the country (e.g. if your ISP only has peering that's capable of 1 tbps total)...as peering like that is really a negotiated thing.

 

 

[mariushm]

Your ISP makes deals with companies that own the fiber cables that go across countries, or across the oceans, and basically rents capacity on the cables - for example, an ocean cable may be able to transfer 500 gbps and your ISP may purchase  "guaranteed 500 mbps, up to 1 gbps" on that cable.   

 

Your ISP then may take your data, and a few hundred other subscribers' data and squeeze it  on that ocean fiber cable to go across the ocean, and depending on how much other ISPs use that cable, your ISP may get that "up to 1 gbps"  but at some moments, the ISP may only get that guaranteed 500 mbps they purchased so if they push 800 mbps  and only 500 mbps is allowed to go, then every subscriber's speed is slowed down so that in total only 500 mbps go through the cable. 

So while you may have 300 mbps speed from your computer to the ISP a few miles away from you, once it leaves the ISP the data may travel slower depending on how much money the ISP spends.

 

There are also peering exchanges  - think of it like locations where a lot of ISPs bring a big fiber cable and there in the building there's a bunch of networking equipment which allows them to pass data between them, often for free. 

For example, ISP X from Germany brings a cable in a peering exchange in Holland and ISP Y from France brings a fiber cable to the same peering exchange in Holland, and these two can make a deal -  Germany guy says  Hey, instead of me paying a fiber cable company in France money for my data to travel across France to various datacenters, let me push the data through your cable that comes to the peering exchange in Holland, and this way the requests from my subscribers reach websites served from servers in France datacenters, and I'll do the same for you in return.

It's free for them, but it's potentially slower or a limited bandwidth (ex 100 gbps of free exchange versus 1000 gbps available fiber cable capacity at company that does transit)

Also, the pings are higher, because data could go Germany - Holland - (maybe Belgium) - France instead of straight Germany - France and longer distance means higher latency (bigger pings).

 

That's why internet plans are "up to"  because maximum speeds can not be guaranteed, and you get the maximum usually relatively close to your location or within your country. As the remote computer's location is further away, there will be more nodes, more places where data hops from one network to another, and there delays and slowdowns can happen.

 

[Ericke_012]

Thanks guys this actually cleared a lot of things. But what if my net speed is just around 100mbps when i download or upload to my Gdrive given that google has servers all over so this would mean that my ISP is limiting its speed sometimes, cause we get full 300mbps some of the times

 

[mariushm]

Google has datacenters all over the world, in various datacenters. 

It uses some tricks to automatically connect you to a server close to you as possible but it's possible those servers are in a datacenter that has internet from a different ISP than yours and the connection between your ISP and the other one could be poor - even if they're both in same country. 

It could also be that Google itself is limiting you to 100 mbps, not necessarily that your ISP limits you. You could experiment for example opening 3 Chrome browsers or a Chrome and a Firefox and then upload a different file in each browser.  Then you can easily see in Task Manager how fast your network card uploads data - if the sum of both uploads is still 100 mbps, then your ISP is probably limiting you. If you go above 100 mbps, most likely it's just Google or simple congested network.

 

It happens - at work the IP addresses the "business" ISP gives us are fixed IP addresses registered as being located around 200 miles from our actual location, so if Google has servers in a datacenter in my actual town (big one, 3rd by the population count) I could be connected instead to servers from the capital of the country, which would be around 50-60 miles away from that registered location of the IP addresses the ISP gives me. 50-60 miles is closer than 200 miles in a straight line, so Google thinks the servers in the capital of the country would give me files faster, instead of serving the cached files located on servers in my town, or instead of letting me upload the files to a server in my town, and then in background the files would later be uploaded to google's more permanent servers.

 

Also as an experiment you can see where a site or something is located using traceroute.

For example try this website with www.youtube.com  : https://geotraceroute.com/new.php?host=www.youtube.com&node=0

Depending on what server you choose (that's the computer from where youtube is accessed), you will see youtube website loads from different parts of the world 

For example, from the France location, youtube loads from a server 376 km away : 

 

 

For the computer in a datacenter in Turkey,  Google think it's best to serve the page from Spain, not France or other country that could be closer physically - my guess is the ISP in Turkey probably has a direct fiber connection to Spain, through the ocean, and it's preferred instead of going on land. 

Or, maybe Google screwed up.