what kind of transfer speeds between sf and hong kong?

December 4, 2007 10:53 PM

Our office is setting up a satellite office in Hong Kong. We've always had trouble sending our large 5GB files to Asia. But our office in HK with have a 100Mb internet connection. We have a DS3 in San Francisco. We'll be using a proprietary third-party app to do the heavy lifting. Realistically, what does the hive-mind think we will experience in transfer speeds?
posted by roderashe to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Variable and twitchy. The great firewall is no fun.

Is there any chance of getting a leased line, or are you stuck using The Greater Internet?

The leased line won't get you around the firewall, but it'll probably still help a lot...
posted by flaterik at 11:17 PM on December 4, 2007

For a branch office in Hong Kong, your DS3 and any traffic shaping rules on your inter-office routers, plus your choice of inter-office transport will generally govern your transfer speeds. Relying on the public Internet means you don't care what the connectivity is, or what transfer speeds you achieve, as much as you do about price. If transfer rates, security, and reliability are vital to your branch office operations, buy connectivity from established vendors with area facilities.
posted by paulsc at 11:58 PM on December 4, 2007

Good luck with your transfer speeds. It became cost effective for us to overnight DVDs.
posted by artdrectr at 12:01 AM on December 5, 2007

its worth noting, that the great firewall of china doesn't operate in hong kong. so no worries there on that behalf. in mainland china it becomes a bigger problem (in-country speeds are good, getting out can be a major bottleneck)

the majority of ISP's in hong kong are very good with high speeds, although latency can sometimes be an issue.

i found my best routes out of hong kong were via singtel's undersea fibre networks, theres not a whole lot of control you have over this though, unless you can shop around a lot of ISP's to see who their upstream providers are.
posted by dnc at 12:39 AM on December 5, 2007

You should be able to get close to wire speed on your DS3 - figure 3.5 to 4 MB/sec. It depends who you buy your bandwidth from in SF and HK, but any of the tier 1 providers should be able to get your packets to HK reasonably quickly. You'll also need to do some tcp tuning to make sure you've got enough packets in flight.
posted by foodgeek at 6:44 AM on December 5, 2007

TCP is fairly sensitive to latencies. If you're able to tune some parameters, there's a decent bandwidth-delay product calculator here for what to set the TCP buffer values to. If they're not properly setup you could have wildly inconsistent speeds.
posted by Skorgu at 10:40 AM on December 5, 2007