Posted on: April 8th, 2011 by Famous Phil
This blog revisits my blog posts about Evdo and Satellite based internet. You can view my original series here: My Internet Usage History : Using a 10′ satellite dish to obtain a cell phone signal :: Technically comparing Evdo, Satellite, and Dialup. I’d especially recommend reading the comparison blog before continuing on with this post.
About a month ago now, I interviewed at Google in Mountain View, California (I can’t elaborate at this time), and I had the privilege of flying with Southwest who offers Wifi on their long flights across the US. I thought I’d append to my original technical comparison blog with some additional speed tests. Southwest uses Hughesnet for their in-air internet service, so I expect that these results would be very similar to Hughesnet on the ground.
I’d first like to draw your attention to some simple pings (a test that tells us the time it takes for an internet data packet to travel to and from a computer on the internet / network). The pings took place somewhere over Nebraska. Matthouse.us is located in Atlanta, and int.matthouse.us is located in Chicago. Both of these servers are serviced by a mixture of Level 3, Cogent, and other smaller providers (redundant links).
PING matthouse.us (98.142.216.195): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 98.142.216.195: icmp_seq=0 ttl=44 time=835.283 ms
64 bytes from 98.142.216.195: icmp_seq=1 ttl=44 time=879.877 ms
64 bytes from 98.142.216.195: icmp_seq=2 ttl=44 time=924.125 ms
— matthouse.us ping statistics —
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 835.283/879.762/924.125/36.270 ms
PING int.matthouse.us (206.217.130.77): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=0 ttl=40 time=835.422 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=1 ttl=40 time=1153.039 ms
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=2 ttl=40 time=923.749 ms
64 bytes from 206.217.130.77: icmp_seq=3 ttl=40 time=758.116 ms
— int.matthouse.us ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 20.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 758.116/917.582/1153.039/148.035 ms
The speed test on Southwest around the time I took the above pings:
Overall, this isn’t bad, considering that I was going at 500mph or so at about 37,000 feet.
Finally, I thought it would be cool to share a speed test directly from Google’s wireless network in Mountain View! I was impressed by their network, although I wasn’t surprised. Google invests a lot into their network since they have a lot of traffic that they have to deal with!
Tags: Google, internet, southwest, speed, speedtest, wifi
Posted in Personal, Technology
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