TM Net’s Streamyx. The productivity killer par excellence.
April 25th, 2009 | by Sean |I have never clicked on a link to slashdot.org and been impressed with the speed it loads at in Malaysia, it is usually more than five minutes before even a single page will display in my browser. Some days though, the pages never load at all. Today is one of those days. I just want to reply to a comment on slashdot, and all I get is the “Network Timeout – Try again” page from Firefox.
Here’s a ping to slashdot.org – 28% packet loss is completely normal for Streamyx, it is often this crap or worse:
sean@taiguima:~$ ping -n slashdot.org
PING slashdot.org (216.34.181.45) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=1 ttl=236 time=671 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=2 ttl=236 time=670 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=3 ttl=236 time=669 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=4 ttl=236 time=660 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=6 ttl=236 time=665 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=7 ttl=236 time=658 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=11 ttl=236 time=669 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=13 ttl=236 time=672 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=14 ttl=236 time=659 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=15 ttl=236 time=672 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=16 ttl=236 time=666 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=17 ttl=236 time=672 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=18 ttl=236 time=667 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=19 ttl=236 time=655 ms
64 bytes from 216.34.181.45: icmp_seq=20 ttl=236 time=655 ms
^C
— slashdot.org ping statistics —
21 packets transmitted, 15 received, 28% packet loss, time 20040ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 655.268/665.761/672.884/6.126 ms
I still have my DiGi EDGE adapter, but can’t paste a ping report: it seems as though DiGi have disabled ICMP on their network. DiGi never fails to work though, so even though it’s a slower network technology, I get the page I want from slashdot in under 30 seconds, reliably.
If you’re considering a web-browsing connection in Malaysia, I would strenuously recommend you avoid Streamyx like the plague. It’s not bad when it works, but in my experience those days are too few in number. Slow you can deal with. There’s absolutely nothing you can do with a broken Internet connection.