How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#1

Post by dannyr » Fri, May 06, 2011, 3:36 PM UTC

How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.
thenextweb.com

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#2

Post by 51Cards » Fri, May 06, 2011, 3:53 PM UTC

What's funniest is that if you look closely at the Speedtest.Net image, Google only gets a 3 1/2 star rating. No one is ever happy I guess.

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#3

Post by andrewvc » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:01 PM UTC

I usually can't get those kinds of speeds from most of my servers in datacenters generally.

Speedtest uses servers in the same city, and game downloads probably do as well (CDNs) but the average case is likely significantly slower.

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#4

Post by wazoox » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:01 PM UTC

I suppose they're making some use of their gigantic caches of the whole web as a proxy, too?

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#5

Post by nt » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:06 PM UTC

I get similar speeds at work ( financial company in NYC ). Can't download any games though :-(

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#6

Post by maratd » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:10 PM UTC

That doesn't even make sense. For you to get to those sorts of speeds, you need jumbo frame support. While you can get that taken care of on a LAN/WAN or for Internet2, you can't magically make the Internet support it just by sprinkling Google fairy dust everywhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#7

Post by phpnode » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:12 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #4

I suppose they're making some use of their gigantic caches of the whole web as a proxy, too?

probably not, why would they want cached (outdated) content unless a particular site is down? Also, it's not like that content lives in servers in their office, it's in data centres all over the world (presumably)

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#8

Post by darrenkopp » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:12 PM UTC

Obviously this screenshot was taken before they went over their 250 GB quota and began to be throttled mercilessly.

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#9

Post by microtonal » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:17 PM UTC

Now, let’s put these numbers into perspective. According to Ookla’s Net Index, the average speed for a country in Europe is around 12 Mb/second.

That's partly because most people are happy with such speeds (or at least the speed/price ratio). At home I have a subscription with 120MBit/s downstream. Speed tests usually give 130MBit/s during daytime and 140MBit/s at night.

Given that, 500MBit/s downstream is the very minimum one would expect from one of the leading Internet companies, probably located closely to one of speedtest.net's nodes.

Re: How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

#10

Post by calloc » Fri, May 06, 2011, 4:18 PM UTC

maratd wrote: post #6

That doesn't even make sense. For you to get to those sorts of speeds, you need jumbo frame support. While you can get that taken care of on a LAN/WAN or for Internet2, you can't magically make the Internet support it just by sprinkling Google fairy dust everywhere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame

On my local lan I am able to get to about 40 MB/sec consistently over a gigabit link, and most of that is limited by the fact that I am reading from my local disk when doing so.

Also, the test probably isn't designed for internet connections that fast which could also lead to funky results.