I have linodes in Newark and Fremont.

Speeds TO Newark (i.e., wget speedtest.X.linode.com):

fremont: 0.4 MB/s
atlanta: 17.3 MB/s
dallas: 13.9 MB/s
london: 18.4 MB/s
tokyo: 2.6 MB/s

Speeds TO Fremont:

newark: 19.7 MB/s
atlanta: 3.1 MB/s
dallas: 23.9 MB/s
london: 11.3 MB/s
tokyo: 12.9 MB/s

I've been backing up data from my Newark linode to my Fremont linode. As would be expected from these measurements, this works fine. Now I had to copy some data from Fremont to Newark, and it was slow, and I did these measurements. Now I'm scared that if I ever seriously need to restore a lot of data from Fremont to Newark, I'll be screwed.

Is Fremont normally like this, or is today an aberration?

It's not Fremont, nor Newark - it's the 3000 miles of Internet in between which you're at the mercy of.

-Chris

I'm posting in the Community Forum rather than a support ticket because I realize you can't guarantee anything and I'm curious about other users' experiences.

But since you bring it up, mtr strongly suggests that the packets are staying entirely within Hurricane Electric as they move across the country, and that they are going directly from he.net to nac.net, so there's not really anyone to blame aside from your ISPs (and probably Hurricane Electric specifically).