Trans-atlantic bandwidth

Hello!

I am on the 150mbps plan based in London, and am happy with the speed accessing UK sites (or CDNs).

I also have a small site I am hosting on Amazon EC2, and would like to host that on my Hyperoptic connection instead.

I did some SpeedTests, and it seems like results to the US can get pretty low, same for Asia. Is this similar to what others are getting (also interested in results from other ISPs), and would they be increased proportionally if I upgrade to 1gbps (can someone on 1 Gbps test?)?

I know the problem is not on the SpeedTest servers end, because I also have 1gbps connection at work, and I get 200+mbps to those servers.

Thanks

Good speeds to a London server:
Hosted by fdcservers.net (London) [5.80 km]: 1.827 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 170.50 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 182.81 Mbit/s

Europe is fine, too, at least until we get to Athens:
Hosted by IPB (Berlin) [929.25 km]: 164.597 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 100.01 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 57.49 Mbit/s

Hosted by JM-Net z.s. (Prague) [1031.64 km]: 157.528 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 140.02 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 90.80 Mbit/s

Hosted by Orange (Madrid) [1271.93 km]: 29.757 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 62.97 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 83.90 Mbit/s

Hosted by Greekstream Networks (Athens) [2394.29 km]: 67.916 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 61.98 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 23.76 Mbit/s

US not so much:
NYC:
Hosted by AT&T (New York City, NY) [5569.43 km]: 92.565 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 88.76 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 20.12 Mbit/s

SF:
Hosted by AT&T (San Francisco, CA) [8612.34 km]: 160.613 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 45.68 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 27.60 Mbit/s

Seattle:
Hosted by AT&T (Seattle, WA) [7694.99 km]: 152.761 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 41.16 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 17.54 Mbit/s

Vancouver:
Hosted by Shaw Communications (Vancouver, BC) [7576.10 km]: 188.909 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 10.96 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 24.88 Mbit/s

Calgary:
Hosted by Bell Mobility (Calgary, AB) [7030.20 km]: 149.698 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 41.03 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 15.61 Mbit/s

Tokyo:
Hosted by OPEN Project (via 20G SINET) (Tokyo) [9552.10 km]: 269.717 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 30.93 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 9.44 Mbit/s

Beijing:
Hosted by Beijing Telecom (Beijing) [8133.57 km]: 333.9 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 12.49 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 16.36 Mbit/s

Taipei:
Hosted by SEEDNET (New Taipei) [9775.30 km]: 578.848 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 20.53 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 15.71 Mbit/s

Seoul:
Hosted by kdatacenter.com (Seoul) [8850.51 km]: 261.319 ms
Testing download speed................................................................................
Download: 37.14 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed......................................................................................................
Upload: 13.02 Mbit/s

Well that's the problem - transatlantic connections *are* fairly slow; I wager that if you had a VPS somewhere in the states & ran a speedtest against a london server, you'd also find the performance sluggish.

Never mind the (minimum) 75msec latency hit for having traffic cross the pond!

I'd suggest that you have a few options ahead.
1) If your site needs high speed in both Europe and the USA, find a way to speed it up in both locations. This could mean hosting it on separate servers & using a clever DNS resolver, or getting a CDN (Cloudfront / Cloudflare) in place to assist.

2) To just not care, and accept that those across oceans will suffer slower performance accessing your site.

Of course, there's the hybrid option, where you could host site static assets (such as images, css, js) on a CDN, with the dynamic content served from your site. That might strike a reasonable balance!

I do actually have a VPS in Oregon, and have run SpeedTests to various destinations. Its bandwidth to London isn't great either.

I do understand that for a "serious" site, CDN is the way to go, but mine is just a small blog . Though I'm willing to pay for 1 gbps if it will also help with transatlantic bandwidth (if QoS on those connections is proportional to connection speed to ISP, which I guess must mean the bottleneck is somewhere Hyperoptic controls). So that's what I am most curious about.

An ISP once data has gone out to peers has little influence, other than refusing to peer with poor peers or buying better transit for areas where no peers are available.

So the puzzle is going to be largely a case of looking at traceroutes and peering databases.

Typically the limit is actually the latency.
Without repeating a lesson on how TCP works, usually you're at the behest of the latency, especially on smallish files (css / js / images / html) for overall transfer speed. Doubly so when your machine needs to request a new image.

With a page maybe containing 50 resources and the browser opening a few threads to grab all of these, a latency spike from 20 to 150 msec would cause a noticeable slowdown.

I don't think that the upgrade to the 1gbit connection would be the fix to the problem; if your blog is popular in the USA and you want to speed up loading you'll need to find a way to host parts of it over there. The easiest balance to strike would be to use something like cloudfront for the javascript, images and css: these between them will make up the bulk of the resources on a typical blog, and usually they are fairly static, only changing seldom, if at all.

Certainly, this solution (or a similar one) would be much cheaper and more effective than to upgrade to 1gbit over here.

Amazon does things such as hosts content local to the user at edge locations, these are are located in most of the major cities around the world and they ensure latency is not high to an end user... Amazons CDN is CloudFront, in all honesty you get what you pay for.

Say I have an Amazon instance in New Zealand and I upload a bunch of stuff there, then someone goes onto access this content in London, the first time someone loads that content in London it will load quite slow, but then it will be cached by Amazon at the London Edge Locations, so all future users loading that data in London will get the data from the London edge location hence no further slowdowns.

It seems as though you are trying to host your content in London, with a view that each user worldwide will come all the way to London to access that data and content. If someone is in Australia, they will notice considerable lag, you cannot host it in one country and expect fast performance worldwide. It needs to be hosted close to the users accessing the data, hence why Amazon have the CDN etc.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Wed 09-May-18 03:39:23)

Stick CloudFlare in front of it:

* HTTP/2 pipelining.
* Minify content.
* Cache all the static content.
* Use their "always-on" feature so if your connection goes down they still serve up some cached form of it.
* All the features of a CDN.
* Free account allows you to get up and running within minutes.
* Loads more features that speed up your site (go read about it) ...

You would need a static IP address from your ISP though.

Cloudflare or if you don't like/want to use cloudflare look at bunnycdn or belugacdn.

Both smaller CDN's I prefer bunnycdn but that's more a personal preference thing I tried beluga and it seemed to work, wasn't that impressed with the control panel, but they've redesigned it since and it looks a lot better now.