Envato Notes |
| Community Poll: Internet Speeds From Around the World in 2013 Posted: 19 Dec 2013 04:17 PM PST When people ask me where I work, I often reply, “On the Internet.” That’s true of most people reading this article, which means that our livelihoods dependent on our access the Net. How good is yours? Being curious, we recently asked the community to post their Internet speeds on the forums. The response was overwhelming—not just in terms of the huge number of people who took part in the thread, but also in the huge inequality of our access. Read on to learn more. Internet Speeds from Around the WorldWhen I took stock of our forum thread, 205 people had visited Speedtest.net and posted their results. I created a spreadsheet of the results, and started exploring. There is huge inequality in the access community members have to the Internet. Some members fly, others crawl. Some seem to have their own private Learjet, while others watch the snails fly past. This area chart demonstrates how big the gap is between our fastest download speed of 925.52 Mbps, and our slowest, which is just 240 Kbps. That’s 4,000 times slower! Those speeds are the extremes, but what is the distribution of download speeds throughout the community? You get some idea from the area chart, and here are a few statistics. Our average download and upload speeds (I’ll get to the maximum and minimum speeds soon):
Pings:
You get a good idea of the distributions of speeds in this pie chart: Most of us (65%) have “normal” speeds of between 10 and 30 Mbps. It’s good to know we’re so normal! But not all of us… The first thing I noticed when browsing through the forum thread was how much faster some community members’ speeds were than my “pretty good” 30 Mbps. Quite a few people in countries like Romania were getting speeds of 90 and higher. I started to feel jealous! As I read on, I discovered that some people were surpassing 100 Mbps!
It’s hard for me to imagine those speeds. They’re definitely faster than I need to get work done. Much faster. If you’re impressed, don’t be! They don’t come close to the speeds of two show-offs:
Those speeds boggle the mind. But what really left me scratching my head were the slower speeds. It’s hard to imagine how anyone with those speeds could be productive. Here’s what I’m talking about—the five slowest download speeds recorded on the forums:
The word “treacle” comes to mind! As interesting as all that is, they’re just figures. I became curious about real-life experience. Do those with faster speeds always get them, even when contacting servers in other countries? How much do they pay? Are the slow speeds as bad as they sound? So, I asked, and received some really interesting replies… Real-life Experiences of Our SpeedstersWebAboard, our second-fastest community member, says he always gets fast speeds. His super-fast 633.82 Mbps downloads aren’t typical in Australia, and are achieved by an optical connection that costs $100 a month. He has an unlimited data plan, so doesn’t have a cap to worry about. He doesn’t need that speed for work (he says 10% would be enough), but can download a 1GB file from the marketplaces in one second, and finds it handy for video streaming and gaming. Kevvs, our third-fastest speedster, pays the equivalent of $85 a month for his unlimited 244 Mbps optical connection. Sweden has great infrastructure, so he consistently achieves great speeds—faster than the average Swede, and faster than he needs for work (though it’s good for big downloads). Kevvs needs at least 10 Mbps in both directions with good access. “A fast connection with bad connectivity is worse than a slow connection with great connectivity.” Robertojorge pays 49€ (Euros) for his optical Internet package that includes unlimited data, 150 TV channels, unlimited phone calls, and 100MB of mobile Internet (via a USB pen) each month. It sounds like a great deal, and is pretty common in Portugal—if you live in an area that’s covered. Although he only needs 50-60 Mbps for work, it doesn’t make financial sense for him to downgrade, given everything that comes with his package. And the fast speed is definitely handy for uploading and downloading large video files. Capelle pays 22€/month for his unlimited 100/10 optical connection. Optical is common in Slovenia, and he finds it optimal for good workflow, including FTP transfers, download/upload, faster search, and faster loading times of websites. He always gets fast speeds, and says, “Higher speed, better productivity.” Cyzer lives in Lithuania, where Internet technologies get a lot of innovation, and competition keeps costs down. For the last three years he’s paid just $8 a month for an unlimited 95 Mbps optical fibre connection. His usual upload and download speeds are around 100 Mbps, though some servers don’t respond that fast. He doesn’t have to wait for videos to load on YouTube, and VideoHive previews start instantly. Now that he’s used to it, Cyzer feels he needs a connection that fast. I’ll let Cyzer comment in his own words: “When we live in such speeding world, that gives us many opportunities every day, many things we can access, and the ability to do lots of stuff online, it would be a shame to be late or miss something just because of slow Internet speed. I couldn’t imagine sitting there and waiting for three hours for some video to upload, or four hours to download something from FTP with all other bandwidth frozen until the download is done. I can remember times like that in my school, but that was a pain. Now the speed is 100/100 and going up! There’s currently some work being done in my street with fibre optics, and the speeds will go up to 200Mb/s for the same price. $8.” Real-life Experiences of Our Slower Community MembersOur third-slowest member, CGKOO, only pays $15 a month for his cable connection. He finds 300-500 kbps fine—a lot of others in the US have similar speeds—but admits it’s not idea for uploading projects or viewing VideoHive previews. ShermanJackson, our fourth-slowest community member, says there’s nothing great about his 0.42 Mbps connection, but it’s an average speed for a broadband connection in India. He only pays $10 a month, and gets unlimited data, though I don’t think his service provider has anything to worry about. It’s not all bad—this speed is decent for surfing the web and doing email, but it’s terribly slow for downloading and uploading items to the Marketplaces. One community member in the UK pays $20 per month for his 512 kbps cable Internet. He finds it difficult to upload large files—say bigger than 150 MB—but is otherwise almost satisfied. A lot of people in the UK are still on 128 kbps. Njanimator doesn’t want us to feel sorry for his 2 Mbps speed—just a few years ago he was only getting 4-10 kbps. He pays around $20 a month for an “unlimited” download plan, though the speed is halved if he downloads more than 15 GB. 1-2 Mbps is common in India. Optical fibre is available, but too costly. He finds uploading large files very frustrating (“Yes, its like Grrrrr”), and many uploads fail. He feels that 2 Mpbs for a full month is fast enough for anything. Deni from saputrad understands the need for patience. He pays $40 a month for a very slow optical connection—about 0.4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. The speeds are slowest between 11am and 3pm, and it takes a lot of patience to get his work done. He’d prefer 10-15 Mbps for downloads and 5-10 Mbps for uploads, but in a small town in Indonesia, that's just a dream. (At least for the near future.) And finally, think of our slowest community member, h2theme, who was clocked by Speedtest at a dreary 240 kbps. The good news is that he only pays $4 a month for his broadband connection, and gets unlimited downloads. That’s pretty typical in Iran. He has a great attitude, and was really happy to help us with this article. So, thanks h2theme, and all our community members who took part in the forum thread, and supplied more details over email. We live in an interesting and varied world!         |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Envato Notes To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment