Utilities & Mobile PLDT slow

Yeah, that doesn't help much for live streams that you'd like to watch though.
I was excited to watch the 5 day olympic qualifying tournament in speedskating in the Netherlands this week, but so far all I get is a 5 mins summary the next morning.

 

Even Fibre is slow two weeks after Odette. Takes 30 seconds to load a website. Faster in the last 5 days or so. I really think that quite a few of the wires are still down and the bandwidth is not enough for normal speeds for all the customers with power back..... Also, doesn't FilProducts lease from PLDT for it's backbone, so obviously it's the same problem ??? BTW, when we had a PLDT outage (not due to a typhoon) for a few days, we bugged them for a refund and got a couple hundred pesos, twice.

 

I did some tests just now because my PLDT connection feels really sluggish again.

Speed tests to Manila and Cebu City yield similarly weird results - 50MBps download speed, about 30MBps upload, both above what I actually pay for.

However, the latency (ping) is at least an order of magnitude higher than usual - 400ms to Manila, 200ms to Cebu City. That means, your click on a link on some website hosted in Manila takes nearly half second to register on the other end, and it takes another half second before the server's response arrives on your screen. Usually, that latency is about 300ms for connections to europe, but below 20ms for domestic connections.

What this means is that all interactive stuff like surfing the web feels unbearably slow, but your Netflix Stream works fine once it's running (because the overall bandwidth is there). They're either routing data through a whole lot of hoops currently, probably around areas where stuff is broken, possibly even using air links or international connections and/or something in their infrastructure is seriously broken.

Interesting also that Smart mobile data seems to be unaffected by this, I got 148MBps down / 6MBps up with 142ms latency to Manila and 80/16 with 35ms to Cebu City.

 

PDLT appeared life a breath of fresh air to internet suffers but with 18 months experience of it I think it has not lived up to expectations. When it's good, it's good - but there are too many bad periods (often daily or every few days). I used Globe many years ago and considered it poor - but now few people mention it. Is that because it has improved considerably OR no one now uses it! In another 18 months I will dump PLDT unless they substantially improve - but where to go next???

 

Glad you are back with us.

It depends on your area. I have fairly good performance with FilProducts. It was slow in the afternoons after Christmas but has been good otherwise.

 

Yes, generally FilProducts comes out well. But I don't think they operate in my area - perhaps within the next 18 months they will.

 

Yesterday and today we have a problem with our PLDT signal momentarily dropping out a few times every hour, the speed is fine, 42mbps the last time i checked but the dropping out is a big problem if trying to stream.
Anybody else experiencing this ?

 

When checking internet connection speed, the results you get will be quite different depending on whether your vpn (if you use one) is active or not.
Here's my result (pldt fiber) from this morning with vpn off. Note that the download speed is only really good when connecting to a server in the Philippines (although the 60 Mbit download speed from Amsterdam still suits me fine)
View attachment upload_2023-4-4_12-1-42.png
A subsequent test with vpn on resulted in these measurements: (note that the Philippines server download slowed down a lot)
View attachment upload_2023-4-4_12-5-54.png
With regards to download speeds slowing down significantly sometimes, yes that happens, mostly in the evenings and on weekends. I assume because of all the gamers starting up their rig after work (or visiting an internet café to do their gaming).
Obviously though, the external (outside the Philippines) bandwidth capacity of the internet providers in this country is very limited, compared to the speed they "promise" to their customers.

 

My speed was fine when we could stay connected but the connection was being completely lost, hence speed was zero.