Goodbye Streamyx, hello DiGi EDGE
November 2nd, 2008We popped into Port Dickson to buy a DiGi EDGE adapter in preparation for going all DiGi EDGE in a couple of weeks’ time. The local DiGi centre sold us a no-name USB EDGE adapter for RM399. That seems expensive to me, but I’m so fed up with Internet Access problems, I have even considered moving elsewhere in Malaysia to get more reliable access - MetroFon in KL, or its companion in Penang looked promising, but if I’m to move to solve telecomms problems, we may as well quit the country altogether.
EDGE is nominally five times slower than the 1Mbit/s Streamyx connection that we had, although we only ever enjoyed that transfer speed (180kB/s) from TM Net’s Speedometer and from the Xubuntu mirror in Brazil (WTF?), even the mirrors in Taiwan and Australia never maxed out our connection. On the other hand, loading pages from Google and BBC would frequently take two to three minutes over Streamyx, and we suffered frequent complete disconnections. Every time we were disconnected, we connected to the Internet using our old mobile phones via DiGi GPRS. And it always just worked, even if it was slow.
One of the things that really tipped us over the edge (!) in favour of DiGi was calling their support line to check the local access speed. The DiGi rep (I think his name was Azizi) told us the average speed we’d get from the local EDGE network, not its nominal bandwidth! The figure he gave us was an extremely conservative 8-9kB/s. I’ve been reliably getting 18-20kB/s from many sites since going to EDGE, so I’m delighted with the service. Getting an honest and informative response from a telecomms company is refreshing in the extreme, and DiGi (or maybe just Azizi!) is to be commended for their approach.
Back to the adapter. The DiGi centre staff told us it was locally made, but lsusb reports:
0471:1201 Philips Arima Bluetooth Device
So they obviously haven’t finished the product yet! There’s a bit more info from the -v switch:
iManufacturer 1 Wisue Technology
iProduct 2 EDGE Modem
And on plugging it into the Slackware box we use as our home server, it appears as /dev/ttyACM0 (a cable modem?). This all looked very promising, until we failed several times to connect to the EDGE network. We finally tracked down the problem to a ‘magic incantation’. We’re using pppd to establish a network connection, and had “ATD*99#” as our dialling string. Changing this to “ATD*99***1#” (don’t you hate magic incantations?) was all we needed to do to get reliable, fast-enough Internet access. The server is connected via the USB adapter to DiGi’s network, and runs the squid web cache. Our PCs all access the web via the server’s squid proxy, so we save some bandwidth on commonly-visited pages.
Of course, downloading Ubuntu packages is going to take a lot longer than it does over Streamyx (once you’ve found the magic country on the other side of the world that gives 100x faster downloads than local ones!). You can see the difference on some web pages - you can see large images gradually loading over a few seconds. But what our DiGi EDGE connection has yet to do is load half a webpage, and then nothing for a minute or two before loading the rest of the page, as commonly happened with Streamyx. Page for page, we’re getting much better response from DiGi’s ’slower’ network than we did from Streamyx’s ‘faster’ one.
