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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.

#21
post #11

This reminds me of the good old days, the 90s, when I was a teenager and finally upgraded to a ~50KB/s cable modem from my puny 33600 baud modem. That was a game changer, I even ran an FTP server for a while =) It's been getting faster ever since then, but I never again had that feeling of "OMG it's so fast let's download something for the hell of it".

My first job was in that era at my hometown ISP. I got a discount on shotgun modems. We could pirate Doom and Photoshop 3 on the T1. Nothing ever seemed that fast, even now when I have a 35 mbps fios line.

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

#22
post #12

I think the fastest connection I ever had was back in the day when I worked at CERN. They host(ed?) a European internet hub, so rates were pretty damn quick.

It's easy to get spoiled. 12 years ago my computer was two hops away from an OC-192 and back then I didn't even have anything interesting to try and download (I think I mostly downloaded SunOS ISO's).

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

#23
post #2

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.

That rating is for Google as an ISP. They provide free WiFi to the city of Mountain View which isn't always fast depending on where you are. That probably accounts for the low rating.

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

#24
post #14

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…

Yeah. I was expecting multi-deca-gigabits at the very least.

The bandwidth each computer has access to is almost certainly not the entire bandwidth that Google gives its employees access to - if so, the per person bandwidth would be quite low.

Of course, not being a Google employee, I wouldn't know for sure.

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

#25
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

I'm really curious where that speedtest is going, given the 3 mSec ping time.

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

#26

Am I the only one who thought they meant latency? I like my speeds well enough, but I could use some reduced latency. I guess there isn't much one can do about this, though.

Their ping is 3ms. Pretty latency-free :)

(FWIW, my ping is 450ms)

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

#27
post #13

Wow, I did not realize my internet connection at work is actally that good... I ran speed test before some month ago and it was in the same range. (see http://speedtest.net/result/1147935298.png ). Back then I though "not bad". But that a post about something like that would make it the homepage of HN...

Makes me feel like a tortoise by comparison http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284419120.png

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

#28

Am I the only one who thought they meant latency? I like my speeds well enough, but I could use some reduced latency. I guess there isn't much one can do about this, though.

Their ping is 3ms. Pretty latency-free :) (FWIW, my ping is 450ms)

Their ping to what?
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