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How fast is the Internet at Google? Mind blowing.

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

#82

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 m…

More importantly, Google is one of the world's largest ISPs (practically Tier 1) and maybe the world's largest CDN. The speed of their Internet is quite obviously limited by Speedtest or some artificial limiting, not their lines.

Google's offices wouldn't necessarily have as much bandwidth as their data centers. The real surprise here is that Google gives their offices massive connections (presumably to the GBone).

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

#83
It's a bit depressing to think that some day we'll all have connections this fast, but unless we learn to violate the laws of physics, we'll never have single digit latencies around the globe. I like to imagine technology always getting faster, but the speed of light really starts to limit things.

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

#84
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, Google is one of the world's largest ISPs (practically Tier 1) and maybe the world's largest CDN. The speed of their Internet is quite obviously limited by Speedtest or some artificial limiting, not their lines.

Google's offices wouldn't necessarily have as much bandwidth as their data centers. The real surprise here is that Google gives their offices massive connections (presumably to the GBone).

It's not that unlikely. Consider that the offices may have to push significant amounts of code/data back and forth between their offices and their data centers. You probably want to minimize the amount of developer time wasted.

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

#85
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While on the topic of YouTube... why does YouTube constantly buffer these days?

Your ISP? Youtube takes 10-20% of typical internet traffic (more than bittorrent) and competes with telecom TV offerings.

My ISP doesn't throttle, which is entirely why I picked them.

I have access to a connection that downloads 20 megabytes per second from S3, and YouTube still buffers on that connection.

Note that Vimeo doesn't buffer, and Vimeo has higher video quality usually. Also Netflix doesn't buffer.

YouTube has been getting worse with time rather than better. Tons of ads and slow video.

The issue is definitely on the YouTube end, and I'm not the first person to notice it.

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

#87
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's offices wouldn't necessarily have as much bandwidth as their data centers. The real surprise here is that Google gives their offices massive connections (presumably to the GBone).

It's not that unlikely. Consider that the offices may have to push significant amounts of code/data back and forth between their offices and their data centers. You probably want to minimize the amount of developer time wasted.

Consider this question: Let us say the cost of an infrastructure at google HQ is X. X is the cost regardless of internet. Now let us say you have Y which is the price of an average inernet connection for google offices. Or you pay 4 * Y to get that connection. Ok lets make it 10 * Y. Whatever. The point is that if it makes your workers a bit more productive (5000 people?) lets say 3%. I think that 3% productivity on developers translates to WAY above the price of that connection.

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

#88
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that sounds like an awesome investment, what are you subscribed too?

Ziggo in The Netherlands. Television, telephone, and internet all in one for 67 Euro per month. They have Internet-only subscriptions as well, but the whole package deal is more attractive ;).

Thats cheaper than my 10mbit connection + phone + basic cable in new york.

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

#89
post #72

IIRC the internet felt faster in my apartment in Palo Alto (100mbit burstable to town fiber) than on the Google campus. Yahoo's office connectivity was pretty great, though. Maybe they are messing with people?

Were you on the guest network in Google?

No. I worked there for over a year.

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

#90
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ISP? Youtube takes 10-20% of typical internet traffic (more than bittorrent) and competes with telecom TV offerings.

My ISP doesn't throttle, which is entirely why I picked them. I have access to a connection that downloads 20 megabytes per second from S3, and YouTube still buffers on that connection. Note that Vimeo doesn't buffer, and Vimeo has higher video quality usually. Also Netflix doesn't buffer. YouTube has been getting worse with time rather than better. Tons of ads and slow video. The issue is definitely on the YouTube e…

Good question. I don't know. But I'll share a bit of speculation and you can tell me if there are holes in my reasoning.

With out going into specifics there was a lot of effort at Google going into pushing 'popular' videos closer to the likely place they were going to be played. Any caching system or content delivery system, is by definition limited to the amount of edge cache it has and its ability to predict where that content will be.

One of things putting pressure on that cache is probably Google's efforts to put 'premium' content near possible subscribers. Clearly people who are paying money have a higher expection of people randomly watching the latest cat pratfall. So if you're Google and you're doing more "TV" like things, you may have reasons to reserve some of that cache space for your premium content whether or not folks have asked for it from that part of the network 'yet.'

Another interesting area is in transit networks. Generally the tier-1 networks who provide peering connections have done that on a quid pro quo basis (basically I'll peer your traffic if you'll peer mine). However as web 2.0 companies like Google or NetFlix start creating very large flows, suddenly if you are 'peering' and your peer is putting a LOT of traffic on your fiber but you have relatively little for their fiber, then maybe you start thinking you want to be compensated for that. We talked about Level 3 and Comcast going at it in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954077

So an explanation might be that your transit network is 'throttling' its peering relationship. I could easily see someone agreeing to 'peering' terms where they take the traffic they've sent and use that as a 'credit' and provide full rate service for an equivalent amount of traffic coming from the peer, but excess traffic might get throttled rather than being 'free.'

This is a very active discussion in some circles. I would not be surprised to see it come up in any discussion of throughput to 'YouTube' vs local throughput.

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