slow downloads from Oz

foreright · 15 Jul 2008 at 07:40

I run a 5 year old PC, WinXP home, Sapphire 64 card and VM 20 Meg BB.
Generally I am more than satisfied with my connection speed and DLing. However, I have a couple of sites that I use in Oz that take an eternity to open. One is graphics intensive but the other isn't. What can I do to speed things up, please.

bigredshark · 15 Jul 2008 at 20:34

Not use a site on the other side of the world? Believe it or not there isn't unlimited bandwidth to every destination, links get congested so it'll be slower...

HangTime · 15 Jul 2008 at 23:04

There are two main problems with .au sites:

1) They have inherently high latency due to the distance - unfortunately the speed of light is a bit too slow for proper global communication

Typically around 300ms which will make browsing sluggish
2) There may well be a bandwidth bottleneck somewhere as all traffic to/from .au will have to go down some specific carriers.

Windle · 15 Jul 2008 at 23:28

Probably a whale on the line :rolleyes:

Hyper · 15 Jul 2008 at 23:50

China is the worst for slow websites I have found.

HEADRAT · 16 Jul 2008 at 05:25

Probaly due to the Great Firewall of China:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China

Latency to the other side of the world sucks, any amount of bandwidth doesn't make that any better!

marscay · 16 Jul 2008 at 05:30

aussie sites are always crap for bandwidth i've found, too many dingos not enough pipe.

Roland0 · 16 Jul 2008 at 06:19

Arent all the far eastern telecom companies really competative and dont carry other peoples data etc (or something similar) thus causing crappy speeds and latency?

AbsenceJam · 16 Jul 2008 at 09:11

Crap bandwidth and long distance, nothing you can do really.

HEADRAT · 17 Jul 2008 at 01:08

Stoned_SpaZZZ said:
Arent all the far eastern telecom companies really competative and dont carry other peoples data etc (or something similar) thus causing crappy speeds and latency?

They won't carry it for a fee, Peering can either be:-

Private Peering = 1:1 connection between two routers to pass traffic (just the cost of hardware/fibre)
Public = Over an exchange such as LINX
Settlement Based = Pay something low per Mbps
Transit = Pay a higher amount per Mbps (usaully has an SLA).

above are just a rule of thumb, at the end of the day nobody is going to carry your traffic over their expensive network for nothing!

queamin · 17 Jul 2008 at 01:30

Well down under they still use tin cans and string

AbsenceJam · 17 Jul 2008 at 02:00

HEADRAT said:
They won't carry it for a fee, Peering can either be:-

Private Peering = 1:1 connection between two routers to pass traffic (just the cost of hardware/fibre)
Public = Over an exchange such as LINX
Settlement Based = Pay something low per Mbps
Transit = Pay a higher amount per Mbps (usaully has an SLA).

above are just a rule of thumb, at the end of the day nobody is going to carry your traffic over their expensive network for nothing!

You're completely ignoring the settlement free peering of Tier 1 networks which is a large part of what makes the internet work.

HEADRAT · 17 Jul 2008 at 15:56

Not completely ingnoring it just didn't make it on my list (which I wrote when I was tired and it was very late), as you say ISP's have bilateral agreements on carrying each others traffic.

marscay · 17 Jul 2008 at 18:34

queamin said:
Well down under they still use tin cans and string

they actually had decent cable broadband (2mbit on launch? cant remember now) way before ADSL started in this country - the trouble in Oz has always been bandwidth restrictions.....tis not a leechers paradise.

their HDTV position is also more progressive than here in the UK - which isn't hard to imagine.

ste_bla · 17 Jul 2008 at 18:40

This may be the same in Oz however in New Zealand local(national traffic) is very cheap where as international traffic is not so they used to (and some still do) have two bands of allowance I remember paying ~£40 for 5gb International and 35gb National allowance. Therefore using that example websites will serverly limit there offshore bandwidth unless they are a big player.