Internet Speed

Tony, I live in Bacong, first town south of Dumaguete, not sure how this applies to other towns but I will share my power situation.
Brownouts in my area, recently, have been few and short lasting. At times when Dumaguete gets hit with a brownout, we are not affected. Following is what I learned regarding electrical power to my home. Firstly, make sure you have access to Noreco's primary (main) line, not their secondly line. When I first moved here, there was only a secondary line providing 140 to 180 volts to my house, mostly 160, obviously not enough to run much. I finally was able to convince Noreco to put a primary line to our street, which was only about 250 meters from their last transformer. I then purchased a 25 kv surplus General Electric transformer, and added some automatic voltage regulars. Now I can run aircons and microwave with no problems. I had one disaster where the Noreco line was cut but that was freakish.

 

As they say....location, location, location is critical for "good" internet, and reliable electricity.

 

I notice everyone seems to be using Speedtest.net to test their connections...that site is cache-able and many ISPs have begun to cache it on their servers so it will show you a faster, local speed. It is better to use DSLreports.com as their test in not cache-able. Also, testing your speed to a server in the Phils is likely meaningless unless you only visit sites/use servers in the Phils. (And their are very few sites that are actually hosted in the Phils...even DI is hosted in the US.)

Overseas performance is also much different between the various ISPs...my 12 mbps Sky Broadband in Makati had slower international speeds than my 5 Mbps Globe in Dumaguete...their speeds to their local server in Makati were blazing fast...but I never visit ANY sites/servers hosted there so it useless to me.

 

Not true as you have said. Now the real problem is that Seedtest.net has connections to test locally in the Philippines and abroad as well. PLDT, Globe, and so forth all use the local Philippine servers to test their bandwidth if you let them. However that is no different then testing the speed of your local home network and then trying to claim that is the "internet speed" just to a much bigger extent and the lie all the companies use. Not even 0.01% of the internet is hosted in the Philippines and many will say none at all realistically. So to test the true internet speed you must select a server outside the Philippines which forces check to go over the backbone lines outside of the Philippines and actually traverse the internet.

Now the problem of bad speed is because of the limited international cables from the Philippines to whatever hub say Singapore for instance. There are limited cables which can only handle so much traffic and said internet providers don't wish to invest in establishing new cables or leasing more private cables from elsewhere. Now with this as an example lets say Globe as we all hate Globe lease a piece of a cable that has 1 Gigabit throughput. They can essentially cut that down and sell 1,000 1Mb connections off that piece with making sure everyone has their fair share of what they are paying for. However instead they resell each 1Mb piece over and over again say 100+ times assuming most will be barely using their connection and not at the same time which in theory works good when overselling it 3x but more then that you bog down your system.

Basically all of these providers are over sold 100-1,000x more then they can realistically support with the connection they sell. This is also why if you get a 1Mb connection they "guarantee" minimum of 512kbps (not like the guarantee means anything) but if you get the 2Mb package your "guaranteed" speed is still 512kbps even though your paying double for the same crap slow speed most of the time.

 

Latest internet speed in my place

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