Hate to carp on about this but yet another (alleged) example of Apple bilking it's non-USA customers? Quell surprise?

The .Mac suite is very slow for me here in England. I have a 20 Mb connection and my US based downloads are nice and fast. Uploads are also pretty spritely. The only exception is .Mac. Syncing, uploading pages with iWeb - It's all painfully (and embearrassingly slow). It's par for the course with Apple though. I've been using their stuff for around 15 years now and in that time we always end up getting stiffed. iTunes store, iPhone, .Mac speeds - The list goes on. I must confess that I have lost track of the percentage of Apple's sales made up by overseas business (seem to remember 40%?) but it's enough to warrant some more effort. Sadly, this will go away quietly (as usual) and nothing will be done. We'll suck it up (again, as usual) and get stuck paying more money for less.

This is something i've noticed for a good long time, it has improved slightly recently, but even a couple of years ago from a high speed university connection i could only achieve about 20-30k/second.. and if i pipe my connection via a peer in the US, suddenly it increases in speed quite dramatically! Also i've noticed constant postings regarding this on the discussion posts in the past, but apple seems to have deleted them off pretty quickly! My subscription is up for renewal in a few weeks, i'm doubtful i'll actually bother....

Yep, I am one of the individuals complaining on the Apple Discussions website, and there are a lot of seriously upset people who are paying for a service that is capped for Europe!

I recently travelled to the USA and the access speeds there are completely different!

So Apple needs to fix this ASAP, cause this stinks and could seriously hurt them if it actually came out that the darling of the 21st century sells a capped service to everyone but US customers!

This isn't Apple's problem. Its YOUR problem! Can Apple be held responsible because you decided to live in some far-off foreign country?

Maybe its Jobs' way to protest all those countries helping the US fight the war in iRaq. .Mac stands for FREEDOM, baby! You terrorist-coddling countries!

OMG, and I just noticed that I've now spelled the name of a country as if its another Apple product. I guess it goes with iRan and eStonia (in eMac and eMate tradition).

Testudo's comments aside, this may not be intentional. Apple may have partnered with some other company to provide bandwidth within the United States to boost .Mac speeds (such as Akamai, for example), and they may not have done anything similar for European users. I doubt they are intentionally capping the speeds.

Also, there may be some ISPs that could be capping the bandwidth to certain sites, and that's not something Apple would have any control over. (Note I said SOME, not ALL).

Still, if it was an oversight on Apple's part, it should be corrected, and users would be correct in bringing it to Apple's attention.

Yeah right! How many ISP's do you think we use in Europe, in all those countries? It;s not like the States where you can choose between AT&T or Sprint, Republicans or Democrats, etc.

It's a true problem which needs to be addressed by Apple, like in Apple Inc.

.mac operates out of Cupertino and Fremont, Apple doesn't use ligtera or akamai for .mac: they don't make sense as they only apply to multiple users downloading the same content, not a single user uploading/downloading their content.

Last I knew of, Apple didn't throttle .mac at all (err, couldn't, rather than didn't) -- it's possible that the service has been "capped", but if so, that would apply to both US and worldwide users, which seems like a losing proposition.

iDisk has always sucked when latency got beyond very, very reasonable limits (opening a NY "mirror" was considered, but not followed through on as 1/ it would be very expensive 2/ it wouldn't fix the problem.

Is this a new issue folks are seeing, or is it just old issue more noticeable?

.Mac is accesible from outside US via different ISP points of peering. (Building where ISP share with GigaRouters access to respective networks): so a website from US can be seen by a user in EU both with different ISP. At Peering points each ISP have a pre-defined bandwidth, this because Data Traffic costs. Apparently IPS used by Apple should increase bandwidth at US-EU peering point. This will cost more money to Apple, and since Apple users in EU are just a small % of US... take your own conclusion. Greetings from Italy.