Goodbye Streamyx, hello DiGi EDGE

November 2nd, 2008 | by Sean |

We 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.

  1. 10 Responses to “Goodbye Streamyx, hello DiGi EDGE”

  2. By tychien on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply

    Wow.. I’ve never imagined DiGi’s GPRS/EDGE to be a viable alternative to s***myx.

    How has your new connection been faring so far? I’d really love to know your average ping times to several popular sites (both overseas and local :D)

    Please do drop me an e-mail at “tychien99 a.t msn d.o.t com”

  3. By tychien on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply

    And also, does Digi impose any restriction on the connection? (e.g. random blocking of ports, throttling, suddenly putting your connection on some crazy dynamic-hair-raising-balls-crushing proxy)

  4. By Sean on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply

    “Viable” depends on your outlook, to be honest. I’m a wireless network hater, and would only ever use one if I was desperate. Streamyx was so bad for me, I became desperate. Having said that (ping examples at foot), it’s slow loading pages, compared to Streamyx when it’s good. It’s fast loading pages when Streamyx is bad. Pages from the US would routinely suffer from timeouts on Streamyx, but that doesn’t seem to happen for me on DiGi. Apart from local sites that always loaded near-instantly on Streamyx, I reckon my web pages _finish_ loading earlier on DiGi than they did on Streamyx.
    I only get about 2-4x dialup speeds (21kB/s MAX on downloads), but it’s reliable. I haven’t once felt the urge to scream swearwords at my monitor until I can see the veins on the back of my eyes overlaid on everything.
    The thing I notice most is latency when using a remote terminal. Check the total times on the pings below. The delay for characters to be echoed can be several seconds long sometimes.
    We have 2 PCs sharing our DiGi connection, and occasionally 3. It’s good enough for browsing and email. If we want to watch YouTube videos, we open them up in a tab and watch them later!

    Pings: times x count != total (I don’t know why)

    PING tremulous.net (208.97.168.42) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from apache2-noxim.selma.dreamhost.com (208.97.168.42): icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=559 ms
    9 packets transmitted, 9 received, 0% packet loss, time 19399ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 394.528/522.238/681.926/80.795 ms

    PING google.com (209.85.171.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from cg-in-f99.google.com (209.85.171.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=232 time=622 ms
    12 packets transmitted, 12 received, 0% packet loss, time 21533ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 372.866/466.693/622.827/79.004 ms

    PING exabytes.com.my (210.48.145.168) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from exabytes.com.my (210.48.145.168): icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=434 ms
    13 packets transmitted, 13 received, 0% packet loss, time 50322ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 196.947/453.570/1356.740/301.930 ms, pipe 2

  5. By tychien on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply

    Well, I use my connection mainly for gaming, so the only thing I’m looking for is line reliability (since, we’re comparing this with STREAMYX after all). Look at these ping results to my game’s datacenter and it explains itself.

    Ping statistics for 12.130.0.174:
    Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 6, Lost = 4 (40% loss),
    Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 313ms, Maximum = 320ms, Average = 315ms

    The avg ping times are already 315 ms. so it doesn’t really get much worse I guess. Then we’ll have to look at the packet loss.. 40% packet loss pretty much means that my game turns unplayable. It’s been like this for like.. 3 months? A complaint to TM has them calling me back during office hours asking me “Are you at home? Has the problem been rectified? Oh? You can’t test this at the moment? We’ll just mark this case as solved. If there’s any further problems, please feel free to contact us”. Get back home and test it out.. Everything’s still the fucking same!
    Complain again.. Same thing happens.. Oh God no.. So just like you, I’m getting desperate.

    Anyway, ping is a statistic, not a value.. so Average ping times x count != total ping time 😀

  6. By tychien on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply

    Hmm.. Upon further inspection, it seems that the time listed isn’t the average ping time after all.. Oh well. No clue what’s happening there

  7. By Sean on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply

    When I ping your WoW server, I get 50% packet loss on the Streamyx connection that I still have until the 20th. Using DiGi, it’s about 10%. WoW is notorious for unstable connections isn’t it? I haven’t played, but if there’s any real-time ‘combat’ component in it, like in Tremulous, you wouldn’t be able to play it over DiGi.

    Maybe it’s worth asking on local gaming forums how other people in Malaysia find their Streamyx connections for WoW? Maybe TM could track down the source of the problem if there’s enough data. Certainly seems like my Streamyx connection has the same problem with pings to WoW.

  8. By tychien on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply

    Some people find a proxy server to tunnel through.. Others just have it good and for some reason are able to connect without having any noticeable packet loss. WoW isn’t exactly well-known for its unstable connections – it’s only well-known for that in MALAYSIA cuz everyone’s on Streamyx. *sigh* Problem with using a proxy server to tunnel is that a reliable and consistent proxy server is close to impossible to find. A working one is probably going to last for a few days before going down AT BEST. Some barely last for 20 seconds.
    Then there’s paid proxy servers, but then.. When you have to fork out an extra RM30 a month to ‘fix’ a problem that we just shouldn’t be facing in the first place, it’s just wrong.

    Tracking down the source of the problem isn’t that hard.. Anyone can do it. Even when TM has blocked ICMP traceroutes, we can still use other forms of traceroutes to find the bottleneck in the routing to the WoW servers. Tracking down the problem is as simple as “tracert x.x.x.x” in a Windows command prompt for them. It’s not about whether they can track it down or not.. It’s that they have no reason to do it, since whether they do it or not, I’m STILL stuck with Streamyx.

  9. By SISMONDA Fernando on May 22, 2009 | Reply

    Hi, i’m trying to use this modem with the smstools. Did you made any test with it? If so…

    My attempts where unsuccessful. I can’t connect to the gsm network.

    My modem configuration on smsd.conf is

    [GSM1]
    init = AT
    init2 = AT V1E0S0=0&D2&C1
    device = /dev/ttyACM0
    mode = new
    baudrate = 57600
    report = yes

    And the error on log is GSM1: Error: registration is denied.

    Do you have the proper init string for the modem?

    Thanks in advance.

  10. By Sean on May 27, 2009 | Reply

    I’m sorry fernando, I don’t have a handy init string for you. I’m travelling at the moment, so several thousand km from my modem. I did happen to setup a friend’s old PC with Xubuntu 9.04 a few days ago, and that ‘just worked’ from the live CD with a USB 3G modem. Perhaps you could ask a friend to burn the CD for you and copy the settings once you get connected? I’m not convinced you’d need a baud rate for ACM0, and certainly not one that low. You’ve got a space in one of your AT commands. Other than that, I’m all out of suggestions! If you get that same error while connected manually to the modem with a terminal emulator like ‘minicom’ or ‘screen’, I’d suspect there’s something wrong with the network-specific config of your modem, and you may need to ask your service provider for settings.

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