Internet in Palau
This $9 scratch-off card is the gateway to the internet for the people of Palau.
Over the past few months, I’ve taken for granted that knowledge is only a few Google searches away. Then, I spent 2 weeks working remotely from Palau (with plenty of scuba diving breaks) and quickly realized how important high-speed internet is for learning technical topics.
The internet in Palau is really, really slow. This made me very curious… why is the internet in Palau so much slower than the internet in Boston? How does internet speed work?
There are 2 factors:
- Bandwidth — rate of information transfer, measured in megabits per second
- Latency — the time it takes information (or a packet) to go from the source machine to a remote machine, measured in milliseconds
Imagine a water hose. Bandwidth is the amount of water that can flow through the hose in any given time period. Latency is the time it takes for water to travel from the start of the hose to the end.
Bandwidth Analysis
How long will it take to upload or download the 7 Harry Potter text files from my analysis from Palau versus Boston? I ran a speedtest to a server at the Palau National Communication Corporation to find out.
Computer storage is measures in Megabytes (MB) and internet connection speed is measured in Megabits (Mb), so first I had to convert the files from MB to Mb.
- 1 Megabyte (MB) = 8 Megabits (Mb)
- Total size of 7 HP files = 6.6 MB = 52.8 Mb
- Palau Upload / Download Speed = 0.13 Mbps / 0.25 Mbps
- Boston Upload / Download Speed = 4.09 Mbps / 10.27 Mbps
Clearly, the internet speed in Palau is significantly slower.
In 2015, the average webpage size was 2.3 MB. From Palau, this takes approximately 1 minute and 14 seconds to load. For someone like me who is used to high-speed internet, it seemed almost unusable.
This has repercussions to the way people interact with each other and for corporations which can’t easily have a presence in Palau. YouTube/Netflix/Amazon videos can’t be streamed. Downloading a common app like Facebook (127 MB) can take an hour and 8 minutes. Video based apps like Snapchat are almost non-existent because of the bandwidth limitation. Tourists are less likely to upload pictures of Palau to Facebook or Instagram while visiting (lost word-of-mouth advertising for local businesses). Maybe these aren’t all negative, but it’s certainly a different way of life than I’m accustomed to.
Latency Analysis
A large portion of modern websites are hosted in Amazon data centers. The travel time for a packet to go from my laptop in Palau to my EC2 server in Oregon is about 420 ms, so even a simple webpage takes like half a second to load.
High frequency stock trading, where milliseconds matter, is impossible from Palau. Voice over IP phone call quality may be sporadic. SSH has a ghost delay while typing. If you’re chatting with someone online, it will take around half a second to send/receive messages.
Traceroute Analysis
To investigate why the latency was so poor, I ran a traceroute to my Oregon EC2 server. Maybe looking at the path data packets take to get there would explain the latency.
Did you know that when using the internet, information (or packets) sent from your computer to a specified destination computer doesn’t typically arrive through a single connection? Instead, each packet takes multiple hops on a number of routers through the internet to complete your request.
Traceroute records the route (or hops) and time between each hop through the internet between your computer and the specified destination computer.
Here’s the traceroute from my laptop in Palau to my EC2 server (some IP addresses are slightly altered for security purposes).
It took 25 hops to reach the EC2 server. Interestingly, the packet goes from Palau → Australia → Japan → USA instead of simply Palau → USA. I ran a few other traceroutes to different parts of the world and each time the packet went from Palau → Australia → Japan before the part of the world being pinged. These additional hops may be the primary reason latency is slow in Palau.
If your intended audience is located in Palau, you probably want to host your web servers with a local Palau ISP or in Amazon’s EC2 region in Australia to keep latency delays to a minimal.
Despite the current limitations with the satellite-only links, there may be a brighter technical future in store for Palau. The details are still in the works, but the country is planning to run a fiber-optic cable from Palau to Guam for high-speed internet access. When this cable is complete, the people of Palau will experience a new off-island world!
