Latvia Has Super Internet

I’ve previously written about how today’s businesses and populations will start forming around high bandwidth hubs and how fiber has become the rivers of the 21st century.

Over the past couple of days I’ve received a good lesson on the incredible difference between a place that just has internet and a high bandwidth hub. In Germany and Poland the internet was terrible — the worst I’ve experienced in at least half a decade. In Berlin it was like 1999 again.

Yesterday from Warsaw I tried to upload an audio recording of an interview to Dropbox. It was around a 100MB file. The estimated time it said the upload would take was roughly one hour. Needless to say, the connection kept breaking and the file didn’t upload.

Today I’m sitting in a cafe in Riga, Latvia, and I tried to upload the same file.

One minute.

Seriously, in one minute it was fully uploaded.

The difference? Latvia is a high bandwidth hub and Germany and Poland are languishing in the digital third world.

This will have an impact on where businesses — which are increasingly global and can operate out of more places — will gravitate to.

The internet is not the same everywhere, and a good connection in the digital world today is like being in a good sea port or a major transportation junction yesterday.