How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?

This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.

This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users. We’ve included this ranking within parenthesis next to each country in the charts below for those who want to know.

These 50 countries together have more than 1.8 billion Internet users.

Why connection speeds matter

Why would you be interested in knowing how Internet connection speeds are distributed among various countries? Here’s why:

• As an Internet user, you can get an idea of how your own Internet connection speed holds up against others in your country.
• As a Web service provider or website owner, you get an idea of what kind of Internet connection speeds your customers are likely to have in different countries. This is highly relevant if you want them to have a positive user experience. This naturally applies to web developers in general as well, who should be well aware of the capacity of people’s Internet connections.

Read more »

Striving to get the most out of your bandwidth? Struggling with slow BitTorrent download speeds? The first step is to see if your BitTorrent client is properly configured through the settings – a simple tweak here and there can drastically improve the download speed. Here are some other suggestions to fine-tune your downloading to maximize those torrents:

— Do not ‘Force Start’ your torrents. While doing this seems to ’start’ all torrents when some are waiting in a queue, this in fact spreads out your upload capacity over too many connections thus impacting your download speed. You are better off to change your settings to allow more current simultaneous connections/downloads.

— Do not operate torrents in ‘Super-Seed’ Mode. Super-seed mode is NOT recommended for general use. While it does assist in the wider distribution of rare data, because it limits the selection of pieces a client can download, it also limits the ability of those clients to download data for pieces they have already partially retrieved. Therefore, super-seed mode is only recommended for initial seeding (ie. new torrents from the original uploader), or for re-seeding. Read more »

Here’s a ridiculously easy tip to squeeze out as many users as you can on a dead or dying torrent. It’s particularly handy when a torrent stops near the end, and/or the seed count is listed as zero. Having said that, I’ve also noticed that it helps to increase download speeds from healthy torrents, as well.

NOTE: Do not attempt this trick with private torrents – it’ll only get you banned from the tracker. Use this tip with torrents you find at mininova, thepiratebay, etc.

How it works:

Simple. Just copy/paste this list of public trackers into your torrent’s tracker list. Read more »