Japanese Internet Connections

If anybody ever complains to you that their Japanese Internet connection is too slow, you should ignore them. They're probably doing it wrong. This is a usage graph for my connection*:If you click on it, you can actually read the numbers, as it open to the full resolution copy. You will see that the big spike on the top graph is where I was downloading 3.3 megabytes per second. While uploading at over a megabyte per second. For reference, here some examples of what you could download if you could maintain speeds like that:

Speed:	3.3	MB/s
Size		StC	MtC
700	MB	212.1	3.5	A full CD
700	MB	212.1	3.5	A standard-definition movie
1.2	GB	363.6	6.1	An HD movie
4.7	GB	1424	24	A full DVD
32	GB	9697	162	All of Ranma. Ever.

StC and MtC are Seconds and Minutes to Completion, respectively. Unfortunately, it's difficult to get those kinds of speeds as very few servers will be sending data to just you. If they are, they probably won't be supporting that kind of data transfer. The peak was 26.4 megabits/second, which is more than two and a half times as fast as we can theoretically get on our connection in Ellensburg. It's also 25% of the fiber line coming into this building. During heavy usage times, such as 9 and 10PM, I usually can't get any more than about 50K/s out of this connection, probably because the building's router is hitting its limit or something.

*Not entirely accurate, but it's not going to be off by more than a little. I was *asleep* at the time, so there's not much else that was going on.