I never knew the U.S had 100mbps connections. I always thought the highest was like 40mbps or somthing. Maybe you mean the connection to your router through the ethernet is 100mbps. If you want to know the actually speed go to one of these websites like this one.

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Australia has 20 million people, 70% of which live in top seven cities.

The U.S. has 300 million people, 8% of which live in the top seven cities.

The U.S. has 50 million subscribers (not just available) to lines of speeds from 3-10Mbps.

Our taxes are lower.

High Speed for all v. I get to choose what I spend my money on... hmm let me think about that.

There are no caps on downloads or fees for overages in the U.S., plans in OZ charge.

Plans in OZ are way more for the higher speeds, the lower speeds are cheap though (but you don't get much DL capacity).

bt just said there going to invest £1.5b in new fibre to the home, so fingers crossed u might get 100mb/s by 2012

Thanks, thought that was wrong.

I will edit later with actual connection.

---15 mbps

Ours is supposed to be 4mb but when I last tested it it was just undr 2mb.

UK broadband sucks....feckin tiscali

Does anyone have a link to one of those test sites so we can compre fairly? The link above only works for USA.

For instance perhaps vaio's connection doesn't quite live up to 100MB/sec? and perhaps mine is not so low (The thing on my laptop says 36Mbps, and goes as high as 56Mbps, but first of all that is in bits instead of bytes... and I think that is the actual laptops capability rather than what I get from my ISP.

8% of 300 million is still higher than 70% of 20 million. Population density in US is heaps higher than Australia, even if we discount those areas of Australia that are largely desert and wasteland. US has no excuse for not providing decent broadband.

Having said that, you are right about the rest. Australia's broadband services suck balls currently, easily the worst out of all the developed nations. While this broadband push is a good idea I know exactly what's going to happen, we're going to get charged through the nose and have shitty caps like always.

That is the magic of ISPs being able to advertise "up to xMB" speeds for you.

My service is advertised as "up to 7MB (orMb)" but I test at 5MB (Mb). So I called customer service and he said it was a matter of several factors including your distance from their servers, He is right, but there is something fishy going on, because I know where their local server farm is and it is a 2-3 minute walk from my house.

This site has many tests including speed:

http://www.mycooltools.com/

It is designed to see if your connection is good enough in terms of quality to support voice over IP which happens to be a good benchmark for whether you can have lag free gaming too. :)

EDIT: Do the Voip quality test and the speed test.