Bandwidth speeds to overseas servers lower?

[masterkjn]

I was testing bandwidth speeds of the airtel 16Mbps connection on overseas servers on speedtest.net. I found that even though the speed to Indian servers were about 16 Mbps, speed to US was about 1Mbps, Australia 500Kbps, European region 2-3 Mbps. The most speed was from singapore server at 6-7 Mbps. If this is the case what is the point of any plans above 2Mbps when you wont get download speeds more then 2Mbps from most places in the world? As i understand most poppular webites like youtube etc are hosted overseas so anything more then 2Mbps wont make much of a difference?

 

[Sushubh]

speeds would also be dependent upon how much bandwidth is provided by the host you are connecting to. i doubt most servers would be able to provide 16mbps to a single user. the basic concept is that you can use multiple services together to get that 16mbps line. torrents would be able to use it fully. but if you are talking about small sites, not every server would let you download at 16mbps.

 

[cyberwiz]

servers dedicated for speed testing like what speedtest.net has should support 16 mbps... if u are getting slow results then it indicates that the international route provided by airtel to that sever using a single bandwidth stream is perhaps not that fast.Most other websites that are meant for browsing will not provide u 16 mbps.. unless its a website dedicated for downloads.16 mbps is useful if u use multiple streams to download...now that could be from a website or from applications like torrent clients

 

[Sushubh]

righto. i think the server hosting the forum has a 10mbps line. so you are not going to get 16mbps download speeds on this forum itself.

 

[masterkjn]

Even if this forum server has 10 mbps upload, my download speed to this would depend on its location. If it is located in Australia i wouldn't get more then 500kbps and i would get only 1 Mbps if it was located in US?Also i play call of duty modern warfare 2 online and i am almost always stuck in red dot(lowest bar). I am assuming most host servers are in the US so increasing my plan above 1 Mbps wouldn't help anyways since airtel's international route to US limits speed to 1Mbps.

 

[kreacher]

Apart from most sites not providing 16Mbps downloads to a user, overseas servers will probably be slower than Indian ones as our ISPs can lay a lot of (inexpensive) cable across India while bandwidth to other countries is expensive. As per Airtel the 16Mbps speed is from your CPE (modem) to ISP's local node (even that is shared I think), there is no guarantee that you will get 16Mbps of international bandwidth.Regarding MW2 red dot that is not an indication of bandwidth, it signifies latency (ping times) - the amount of time it takes for a packet to reach from your PC to the person hosting the game (MW2 doesn't have dedicated servers).

 

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[coimby]

I was testing bandwidth speeds of the airtel 16Mbps connection on overseas servers on speedtest.net. I found that even though the speed to Indian servers were about 16 Mbps, speed to US was about 1Mbps, Australia 500Kbps, European region 2-3 Mbps. The most speed was from singapore server at 6-7 Mbps. If this is the case what is the point of any plans above 2Mbps when you wont get download speeds more then 2Mbps from most places in the world? As i understand most poppular webites like youtube etc are hosted overseas so anything more then 2Mbps wont make much of a difference?

Good point. But for certain services provided by your ISP, 16Mbps bandwidth will be useful. For eg, let us say that your ISP hosted a FTP server from which you can download Operating System (like Linux). Download will be faster than if you were on a 2Mbps link (on the assumption that there no bottlenecks within the ISP's network). But how often do you expect to do such downloads really?

High last mile bandwidth (for a single user) only makes sense for peer-peer applications or when we have lots of content hosted in India.