Cloudflare Radar now shows worldwide Internet Quality | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare Radar now shows worldwide Internet Quality

radar.cloudflare.com

55 pointsCrLf17 comments

The blog post (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-radar-internet-quali...) includes a lot more details on the Internet Quality and Connection Quality metrics shown on the new Radar page.

I find it surprising that Oceania consistently has the highest bandwidth and lowest latency. Why would that be?

it could be related to the fact that there's more people leaving in cities, not that many cities, and those cities have data centers close-by. bigger concentration of population near data centers should go a long way.

Yeah, that stat is based on performance tested by speed.cloudflare.com, so it's actually a mix of overall capability and local speed to Cloudflare data centers. It may also be skewed by relative unpopularity of Cloudflare's speed test site compared to more well known alternatives.

Their speed test service isn't very accurate either, its always over reporting by a factor of 100Mbit/s for me (vnstat running at the time of the test shows this). The JavaScript tests in general are not very useful IMO.

The continent graphs are actually based on measurements towards a set of providers, only one of which is Cloudflare. This is mentioned in the blog post.

Yeah, the IQI measurements are aggregated, but much lower than the continent map, which is only to Cloudflare. So the high bandwidth figure noted by parent is only for Cloudflare.

The map shows numbers from speed tests, which is only to Cloudflare, yes. But IQI's bandwidth numbers are lower because it displays average utilization (i.e. shorter requests, like web browsing, mostly capped by latency) while the map displays connection capacity.

I believe the parent was referring to the lines for Oceania being surprisingly good considering we usually think of it as being far away from content (which is not true when a large chunk of it can be served from local datacenters).

Small sample size? Its pretty noisy data.

The entirety of Oceania has roughly the population of California.

How is New Zealand in the top 10 of download speed? I thought internet there was awful?

Internet may be awful overall but that measurement is strictly download speed to Cloudflare's speed.cloudflare.com test site. Since they have a local data center those speed can be great even while performance to the rest of the world is bad.

Why would you think it's awful? What are your sources? Almost everyone has access to gigabit connections. I myself have access to a 6 gigabit connection. Almost every house has fibre

A couple of people I know that live there have complained about it.

Also I've read many comments from digital nomads over the years.

Of course this is just anecdotal.

Ah understood. Perhaps bad customer service. In general we have amazing fiber penetration via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband which is a government initiative. Much better than the NBN in Australia for example (where I'm from originally) and cheaper too. My gigabit connection is also just under $50USD a month

Could also be that this stuff is relatively new?

To my knowledge most of the fiber roll-out was completed in Nov 2019 (https://www.crowninfrastructure.govt.nz/fibre/ufb-programme/) and they have already started upgrading network speeds to 6 gigabit and beyond. That hasn't had as much availability yet although improving in large cities. It's also about $150 USD so less people opt for it.

It's a misunderstanding.

Oceania suffers from peering/latency issues related to being very far from other continents (+ monopolies). Anything local is fine.

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