FTTH - International speed losses

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Ben$ch

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Good day

I started this thread hoping to get some valuable insight into other ISP's speedtest results. I'm not concerned with local speedtest results, but rather when testing internationally. Local speeds on my link are 95% of the maximum up and down,its great, except nothing that I need is hosted locally. If I conduct a test from JHB to London from the Seacom speedtest link I can see I'm losing about 70% of my line speed, both upload and download. So on my 100mbps link I get 30mbps international. I have spoken to numerous other people who experience the same issue - the issue has also been raised directly with Seacom. I've been assured that my link is 100% and that its an issue with the backbone or upstream provider.

I am fully aware that the line speed will suffer and slow down internationally but this seems extreme. Interestingly enough when conducting the exact same test using my previous ISP's link (Afrihost LTE) I still see a loss, but its not nearly as bad. That service averages around 10mbps locally, but when I test to London I still get 7mbps. I'm desperately curious to know other peoples tests results over fibre when they do an international speedtest to London? So far I've spoken to a few people but they were all on the same network as me... one other person reported they have the same issue with their Vumatel Fttx service.

I know there are a number of determining factors at play, but in its simplest terms, if someone subscribes to a 10/20/50mbps service, what kind of speed loss are they experiencing internationally? What sort of loss is considered normal?:wtf:Would appreciate any feedback... Thanks!
 
Would help if you told us the ISP but I think I may know who, Seacom transit is k@k once it leaves their network.
 
Who is your fibre provider / who is your ISP / where are you located ?
 
So there is a thing called your TCP receive window or TCP buffer, which means the higher the latency to a destination the lower your potential throughput. There are some ways to improve this with application acceleration by manipulating this value, also from Windows 7 and upwards this value is adjusted dynamically.

http://dtsanz.com/blog/why-are-your-international-speeds-slower-than-national/

Is one of the articles that goes over this, but essentially using your web browser is a "bad" technical way of testing this, if you use iperf for example you will get more accurate results.
 
Interestingly I don't see the actual portion of allocated international bandwidth per connection package ever quoted on any FTTH packaged advertised on the net. I would suggest that you ask the SP how much of the quoted package is international and how much is local.

As far as I can tell this is one of the biggest differences between most of the FTTH offerings and a old skool packages like for example a 1:1 contention on 25/25 business type package with 100% local and international traffic, as well as price obviously as this type of "business" package would probably cost 10 times as much as any similar FTTH 1:10 offering.
 
Run an iperf test to a server e.g in the UK, also try out nperf.com.

I can tell you I can get over 500mbs to some international speedtest.net servers, but not all. Many are hosted on vps's with bandwidth and server I/O, cpu etc limitations.
 
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