I’ve noticed an interesting, although not a new, thing about Internet here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about the speed which is more than adequate here, or at least if you know what you’re doing. This post will get quite technical towards the end, but if there is a networking nerd living inside you, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it as well.
I already wrote about the 3G connection on my phone in the last post. In uncrowded places I can get a good 5 Mbps downstream which is quite sufficient for mobile phone use and even decent for tethering a laptop. Of course tethering is allowed and included in my 11000 KRW per month payment, as it really should be in any civilized country.
At home, I have an Apple Airport Express for sharing the connection to our multitude of devices. There is an Ethernet jack in every room (living room, bedroom, office corner), as you would expect from building that is only about 10 years old. Since the building belongs to the university, we’re connected to the university network which makes for pretty fast speeds. The speeds vary quite a lot, but the fastest I’ve seen have been around 50 Mbps in both directions, with the curious observation that typically upstream is faster, even way faster, than downstream. In any case, they beat my 10 Mbps back home in Finland (limited effectively by my “remote” location).
Not that I expected anything less, knowing how well Korea is connected to the net.
Now for the interesting bit. Back in Finland, I’m a subscriber to Elisa’s Viihde service, basically an IPTV service where you can record TV shows in their cloud service and stream them later. Officially, the service only supports streaming via the set-top box, but there is a separate client available that can download the stuff you’ve recorded. Since the bandwidth from here to Finland is highly variable, streaming isn’t really an option, but downloading is. The client is a little bit shaky with poor network connections, so that’s where the interesting stuff comes in.
I’m connected to a university network here. University networks typically are well-connected with high speeds through the research backbones. This holds for pretty much all the countries I’m familiar with. My IPTV provider Elisa, being a commercial company and a telecom operator to boot, is connected via commercial networks. If I start downloading directly from their service, my packets jump from the “academic” Internet into the “commercial” Internet right here in Korea, traverse the Pacific Ocean, fly across the US, the Atlantic, and eventually get to Finland. I’m lucky to get 1 Mbps of throughput in my downloads. One hour TV episode being about 1.3 GB, that implies download times of about 3 hours per episode, if you’re lucky and the connection remains stable, which is usually doesn’t. Not good.
However, if I open a VPN connection back to University of Helsinki, the packets still go to Finland “the wrong way” across the Pacific, but they stay in the research networks the whole way through. My IPTV download will then jump into a “commercial” network only in Finland and the interconnection there is pretty fast. I typically get 5-10 Mbps of download throughput doing it this way, which makes downloads reasonably fast and I think even streaming would be feasible. However, the bandwidth does still vary a lot and I haven’t tried streaming.
To non-networking people, the above might sound strange, everything is on the Internet, right? But things are not quite that simple, and in this case, having lived through something similar in my past, I’m able to get my fix of TV and get the Kids their favorite program from Finnish TV as well. Yes, we let them watch TV, but at least it helps maintain their Finnish, or at least that’s how I rationalize my behavior. 🙂
The reason I knew to try this thing was because I experienced something similar in the past. When I moved to France back in 1997, browsing the Web was quite slow because of the poor interconnection between the French research networks and the back-then-still-in-their-infancy commercial networks. In order to speed up browsing, I would open an ssh connection with X11 forwarding to Finland and run the browser on a computer in Finland. Obviously this means that the browser must render its window over the network in France, but the faster connections in Finland and the fast research network between France and Finland actually made the experience of browsing faster than running the browser locally and using the French network connections. It felt a bit perverse, but it worked, and the other Finnish student who was in the same place was using the same trick as well, once we had discovered it.
So, that’s it for this episode of “Internet and Common Sense Do Not Mix”.