Hotel Wireless Faster than Home Wired Connection
At a conference hotel outside of Madrid, I’m getting a much faster wireless connection than I do on my wired DSL line at home in Silicon Valley. And keep in mind that the test results, shown at the left, are measuring my connection to a server in New York City, not to a server nearby in Spain.
It’s a fairly normal occurrence when I travel to get faster wired connections — the U.S. is pathetically behind the curve when it comes to broadband. But when even wireless is vastly better, you know the U.S. has a long road ahead to be competitive in the global connectivity race.
I recall staying in a Silicon Valley (yes, it still exists) hotel a few months ago, and the speedtest.net reading was “exceeding 8000 kbps” for both download *and* upload. I guess that’d be a great hotel to check in at if I was a spammer. :)
Dan,
More interesting would be the peering route the packets took.
Traceroute please!
Dave
more specifically, Silicon Valley is way behind. i lived in some mediocre uppermiddleclass suburban hell in the middle of ohio but we had 10mbit cable in 1997..the telco laid fiber thru everyones backyards a year later but didnt get around to offering FIOS till like last week..
when i was consulting in Korea in 2002-3 I used to laugh at how I had faster FTP access to NYU’s ftp server from my hotel in Seoul than on the other side of campus in Manhattan. these bottlenecks do happen, and they make the Internet lame for everyone. its fun to see how the other half lives!
try Comcast… 3Mbps down, 1.5Mbps up at home. After 9 years with DSL, I finally made the cable switch and it’s worth it.
Don’t take that as an average for Spain. Much more average is internet that cuts out for a day or so without warning, explanation or apology; that will return when it feels like it (and the company will take half a day to acknowledge it before agreeing that it is a problem at their end) and the whole system run by the ex-State monopoly for whom inefficiency is almost a slogan. The US may be behind the curve, but most of Spain’s infrastructure, apart from perhaps your hotel, is asleep underneath it.