[[!meta description="Whilst internal network speeds in Singapore are great, outside to Europe are a fraction of the speed"]]
In order to better grasp Internet speed issues, I've penned iperf3charts.
Lets run through some real examples. The target sg.dabase.com (temporarily
running iperf3 -s for me, not you) is running on Digital Ocean
Singapore and this shows
you I am maxing out my 2Gbps Gigabit ViewQwest
connection. Max since I can only do 1Gbps (~100 MB/sec) at one time from my
wired laptop network port!
Now on AC wireless between my X1C3 & my TPLINK Archer C7 v2, the best throughput I can get when I am very close to the AP is ~26MB/sec. So a quarter of my 1Gbps port when wireless. Here I am testing in my LAN:
Here is the same wireless test targeting my local Digital Ocean droplet:
Roughly the same, so we can conclude connecting to a Singapore droplet is as fast my Singapore LAN! That's rather good!
But what about outside Singapore??
So my 2Gbps connection to say the Netherlands in an ideal world would be 100MB/sec (1Gbps). But it's travelling up through Asia, across the US and one can expect to be curtailed here and there. It's a testament to your ISP if your outbound connections are high quality as this is what usually costs a lot of money, time & effort to arrange. Sadly, the max I seem to eek from ViewQwest in Singapore out of my Dutch droplet is ~2MB/sec. 1% of my advertised 2Gbps connection speed.
Incidentally from my Singapore droplet, I tested the speed to my Dutch droplet:
Roughly 8MB/sec connection. Not great, but 4x better than my consumer connection.
If you are curious to know what kind of Internet connection speed Digital Ocean has in Singapore, you can actually find out by looking at the size of their ports at your local exchange. For example, at the Singapore Internet Exchange, Digital Ocean has a 10G (1000MB/sec) port:
According to https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/6494 they have 10G ports in Amsterdam, but they note they operate independent networks, so there is no telling what their guarantees there make between their deployments. In my experience AWS have pretty solid connectivity between their "availability zones", but again they make no guarantees.
Again using PeeringDB you can get a better picture of your ISPs "peering" or connections at different exchanges in the world.
Singtel or StarHub might have better or the same ports. But their traffic levels are much higher so your service will probably be worse than ViewQwest who I still recommend despite these depressing statistics.
I encourage you to run your own tests using iperf3charts! If you need an iperf server to target,
contact me. Else just spawn a
droplet or an AWS EC2
instance and get iperf3 -s running on it.
UPDATE: ViewQwest are responsive which already beats all other Singaporean ISPs and they told me: "For NL, redo your tests in February. We have a 10G link SG-Amsterdam direct coming up which is taking almost 3 months to be ready."