RE: Roundup of ISP
Roy wrote:
...As I said, the internet is primarily business for me...no songs, no video, and no 3d photos (sorry Bert). I pay no more than approximately 200 thousand rupiah a month to get the job done...including lots of posts here...
Does that figure include your telephone costs while you're on-line? Maybe you should check your receipts. And just out of curiosity, which of the two available
Centrin log-on numbers do you use? One has a maximum of 33.6Kbs, the other is 56Kbs. Both of these figures are the theoretical maximum download speeds on a dial-up connection. In practice, they don't reflect the reality of what users get (in any country). There are many factors involved which can seriously compromise one's received service.
Many people get confused about how modem/down-load speeds are represented. The basic piece of "information" on a computer is called a
bit. A bit represents a zero and a one. Eight bits make up one
byte. Adding the prefix
K to bits or bytes multiplies the basic figure by 1000 (actually, 1024, because of the nature of binary arithmetic...if you multiply 2 by itself 8 times, you get 1024, not 1000). The convention in writing these figures is like this: 56Kbs (note the small case "b" and means 56,000 bits/second), an equates to 7K
Bs (Kilo
Bytes). So far, so good. But in reality, nobody achieves maximum rated modem speeds because of the myriad "other" factors involved.
Normal network overheads take 10% off straight away. For example: Telkom Speedy's basic broad-band service offers 384Kbs download speed. Dividing that number by 8 (to convert from bits to bytes), gives 48KBs. Taking 10% off that gives an actual, realistic download speed of 345.6Kbs (43.2KBs). Then there's this thing called a "contention ratio", which refers to how many people are actually using/sharing a connection at the same time.
"Typical" contention ratios in the west vary between 10:1 and 30:1. ("Dedicated connections" should be 1:1 but cost a
lot more.) I have no idea what they are in Indonesia (service providers here don't really tell us), but they can be much more than in the west. There may well be ISPs here shoving 100+ users on one modem/port. If you dial into one of those, your speed slows down to a crawl. Sometimes, disconnecting and reconnecting might get you to one that doesn't have as many users on it.
So - how can you tell what speed you're actually getting?
There are many utilities available that can measure both your download and upload speeds in real time. My personal favourite is called
DU Meter. It even has a stopwatch feature which you can start to find out exactly how much traffic has occurred on your connection, both up and down. And you can even run several stopwatches at the same time.
Network/internet congestion also takes a toll on how fast various sites download. There's no cure for that apart from trying troublesome sites at different times of the night or day. And for those of us who do want to download "bigger" files, a download manager is essential. I use
Download Accelerator Pro (which I paid for). There is a free version with some advertising called
Download Accelerator Plus. What they do is search the internet for the fastest available download sites for the file you want to download, download the various pieces and put them back together. In other words, they make the best possible use of the available bandwidth you have. And if your connection drops out during downloading, you can (usually) resume an interrupted download at a later time.
And
nomad4ever
...I can't have Speedy, as I have a digital (modern!) phone number...
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by that. If you've got the time, please tell me some more. I still maintain that
Telkom Speedy is the most affordable "broad-band" option available to (some of) us in Bali. I would dearly love to hear of something better and cheaper.
8)
