**Singapore tests update at the bottom of page*

Went to cell on Friday night. Did a poll and found out there were quite a number of DiGi supporters. With their amazing deals on phones, this strategy will pay dividends down the line. A small company undercutting the big giants in Maxis and Celcom, wise move!

Now that the iPhone is coming soon, it would be nice to see how the synthetic benchmarks fair for their network performance. I’m tethered to my Sony Ericsson phone capable of 3.5G HSPDA speeds. I have “H” signal and 5 full bars of network signal. Here is how it went.

Method: Using speedtest.net for raw speed and pingtest.net for latency and how it will perform in real life.

For those of you who haven’t used this service lately, they made changes to the algorithm to show more accurate results. Downloading files, you still get 70KB/s on my informal tests. So a 350 MB episode of TV series would theoretically take 1 h 30 min.

The speedtest is self-explanatory.

The pingtest tests your line quality, and how well it actually performs in real life. VOIP, gaming, and responsiveness is usually measured in milliseconds (a thousandths of a second). It is quite easy to interprete the results. A ping of 91ms locally means that is the amount of time to a local server; the first “hop”! Streamyx, this would be 20 ms (4 times faster). The explanation for this would be Streamyx is wired, and wireless has some overhead due to equipment inefficiencies and background noise.

Note for San Fran (345ms) and Manchester (400ms). Now that is the real benchmark of how good your ISP is. These numbers can be chopped in half if DiGi is willing to make sacrifises and investments in QUALITY bandwidth. Peering with reputable companies like Cogent, Level 3, Global Crossing and paying premium dollar for higher priority, you can see numbers improving drastically.

I will show you this effect in Singapore, where ping to the same servers *should be* twice as fast. Reason being, Singtel / Starhub is willing to pay more for higher priority premium bandwidth. Hence the better latencies.

One real world example why you want this “ping” to be fast is, when loading facebook pictures. When you click “next” when viewing an album, you EXPECT things to just load instantly. If your ISP is able to do that, then it is paying premium bandwidth.

One note: If you call up your Customer service hotline for your ISP, and tell them your speed is slow. And THEIR excuse is “The server you are connected to is slow”. You can call that bull****. All major servers are capable of very very fast speeds, about 500kB/s per user. Even philipkhor.com running on a cheap server can do that speed if your ISP supports it. So it is utter nonsense to put the blame on the “internet” or “internet congestion!”. (ahem, Streamyx, TM Nut..)

If there is one thing you can lobby for, it is latency (bring it down). Not raw speed (higher speeds).

Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_%28engineering%29

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/speedtests/a/network_latency.htm

http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

p.s Follow me on Twitter @philipkhor for the next 3 days as I venture to Singapore!

*** Singapore test update ***

This is a test to San Francisco test server via Singnet.

Pinging sfo.speakeasy.net [64.81.79.2] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 64.81.79.2: bytes=32 time=238ms TTL=48
Reply from 64.81.79.2: bytes=32 time=282ms TTL=48
Reply from 64.81.79.2: bytes=32 time=245ms TTL=48
Reply from 64.81.79.2: bytes=32 time=262ms TTL=46

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 238ms, Maximum = 282ms, Average = 256ms

We need latency of our broadband to be THIS LOW! Come on, Malaysia!