It’s all about Capacity, not Speed

which is better to improve speed and latency, upgrade your dsl to the next higher plan or buy a dual wan router and subscribe a 2nd isp provider?

@John Alvero, unfortunately the mirror is getting unwanted traffic from Vietnam and saturating our international links. Fyi ASTI has been mirroring CentOS as well so we decided to disable it for now… doesn’t make sense to have 2 public mirrors.

We operate web hosting servers at Vitro Data Center and VIX is indeed peered with major telcos and ISPs. Our clients on non-PLDT networks have found our hosting service fast due to the low latency.

I believe it is a mix of capacity, speed and latency. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had fewer hops to our favorite US-based websites?

Disclosure: Web.com.ph is an ePLDT business partner for hosting and colocation services.

@John Vitro Internet Exchange is another exchange run by PLDT for pay, most of the current MMORPG games played here in the Philippines are hosted there. ISP’s pay a monthly fee to be able to connect to that network. PLDT being the dominant carrier somehow has the “correct” business strategy not to peer, since if they peer with other ISP’s, they’re making that ISP better in terms of connectivity and reach. It’s insensitive but makes business sense.

Internet in the Philippines are expensive and small in bandwidth because of our nature, we are mostly english speaking and likes hollywood, mtv and english contents etc, hence we get our content from the US content providers or generally, outside the country.

Our Asian counterparts are different in a big way, they speak their own language generally. Hong Kong, China and Taiwan speaks/reads chinese and likes Chinese content same with Koreans for Korean content, Japanese, Malaysians and Indonesians etc. Their dependency on expensive international capacity is not that big as compared to us.

To give an idea, a typical internet capacity from Manila to Hong Kong or Manila to US would cost a telco around $40-$80/month for 1Mbps and that is already the wholesale price. That doesn’t include pa everything that makes a network works :)

Broadband penetration also is not as good in our country due to our geographical topology, we’re dispersed expanding many islands making backhauling of traffic from the south/north to Manila expensive.

A good quality of experience in broadband is a mix of capacity and speed, that’s why our bandwidth is expressed in Kilobits/Megabits/Gigabits per Second.

@John Alvero, PLDT doesn’t peer kase with other telco’s here in our country. If you want to peer, then you have to be their customer, paid peering. That’s why everthing outside PLDT’s network would have to go via an international route and back. Globe, Digitel, ETPI, Bayan are all interconnected via gigabit connections locally. Local content outside Vitro Internet Exchange is also lacking. PLDT’s watchpad is for PLDT only, Bayan/Skycable’s Iwantv is for their subs only.

Telco’s cannot give out bigger bandwidth packages cheap because we are so dependent on international routes/cables which doesn’t come cheap, though it is getting cheaper every year, it hasn’t reached a sweet spot wherein upgrading subscriber’s bandwidth drastically would be profitable.

@jade bryan
It’s unfair to say that Globe delivers high-speed connection but with high latency. If you would go out and try to compare cafes subscribed to PLDT, BayanTel and Globe by playing MMORPG games like KOS, SF, etc. you will see or rather feel, that Globe and BayanTel connections lags less than those using PLDT.

The problem is, most pinoy online games today uses PLDT for their servers (and for client based RPGs ie. Garena for DotA and L4D, most gamers are subscribed to PLDT), and PLDT doesn’t provide their local gateway to other Philippine ISPs. Other ISPs need to go through a longer route before reaching PLDT, the reason why subscribers from other ISPs, not only Globe, get high latency from these games.

Anyway, you really don’t need a high-speed speed for online gaming. You can even play an online X360 game on a 512Kbps connection. It’s all about latency and your connection’s consistency.

I can still remember… when I watch the movie Hackers… when 14 kbps modem is considered fast… hmm.. those where the days.. or was it 28 kbps?!

gotta watch the movie again!!!

heheh..

Consistency na lang sana ang i-improve nila. It’s really hard to get consistent speeds throughout the day. Like say, when I try to watch a YouTube video back when the average speed for SmartBRO was 512kbps eh constant and walang buffer sa video. Nowadays you can’t do that anymore. They say na mas mabilis daw ang internet nang SmartBRO ngayon pero you’ll end up buffering streaming videos.

Actually ISP speeds have gone DOWN, which makes your point Yuga. I used to have 6mbps on residential PLDT DSL. They down graded me to 3mbps last year and said that it was now the fastest speed.

So your point is a good one, that capacity is the issue. As PLDT’s subscriber base got larger, they probably couldn’t offer the 6mbps plan anymore.

I couldn’t disagree with Jon more! I can name 32 friends who would kill for faster internet speeds. Of these 4 switched to skycable’s 12mbps plan and 1 lucky dog was able to subscribe to Globe’s fiberline offering (lives in Forbes). I think Jon is trying to speak for a young sector that can’t afford faster speeds at the moment. I think he is wrong for that group, though, as that younger group will get richer and will want faster speeds.

However, I am speaking for an older 35-50 group who need faster speeds at home to telecommute and work with clients and an office that is global. For us, speed is critical.

More than that, saying 1mbps is so shortsighted as to be myopic. Faster consumer speeds are required for progress! Without fasater speeds, a whole host of domestic consumer technology and domestic revenue generating industries, which are already extremely profitable in other countries in Asia, can not happen here.

We are already behind our neighbors in this region. We used to be the #1 economy in SE Asia. Now we are at the bottom. Withotu progress, such as faster consumer speeds, we will never be able to catch up again.

I agree with Jon. Most of us don’t mind the speeds. The important things are stability and consistency. The government should create a law wherein telcos should be able to provide whatever they guarantee on their networks. Telcos should advertise ‘guaranteed speeds of’ instead of the misleading ‘speeds of up to’.

Their enterprise customers dictate how much bandwidth an ISP truly needs to provision. Residential customers take up only a small niche of their income/bandwidth.

Regarding latency, if you play local MMOs, then yes, PLDT may *seem* better (6ms ping is godly.. lol). But that’s only because all our local MMOs are hosted at the Vitro datacenter, by PLDT. Try playing on international servers however, and you will see it’s pretty much the same as any of our local ISPs.

Choosing an ISP is a matter of physical location (where you live) as one ISP may perform better than the other depending on area. A little research is required though, but it’s not rocket science. Just stay away from old copper distributed networks when possible, and go with whatever ISP offers more forward-looking infrastructure.

@Jon
Honest po mga ISPs… kaya nga when they advertise, they will always include the ever familiar “up To” prefix to the speed value… hehe

this is true…