{"id":253,"date":"2009-03-15T16:51:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-15T08:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/?p=253"},"modified":"2009-03-17T13:49:08","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T05:49:08","slug":"digi-and-streamyx-the-tortoise-and-the-hare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/2009\/03\/15\/digi-and-streamyx-the-tortoise-and-the-hare\/","title":{"rendered":"DiGi and Streamyx: The tortoise and the hare"},"content":{"rendered":"

I still can’t be bothered phoning this one in, it is after all just bad and not actually completely broken. It is also Sunday, so the weekend-workers at TM would probably rather tackle something really major. I mentioned a couple of nights ago that Streamyx was bad to some international sites<\/a>, well it still is – here’s a ping to news.bbc.co.uk:<\/p>\n

sean@taiguima:~$ ping -n bbcnews.com
\nPING bbcnews.com (212.58.224.138) 56(84) bytes of data.
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=1 ttl=112 time=529 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=2 ttl=112 time=514 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=3 ttl=112 time=252 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=5 ttl=112 time=507 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=6 ttl=112 time=255 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=7 ttl=112 time=284 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=8 ttl=112 time=256 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=9 ttl=112 time=267 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=10 ttl=112 time=264 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=13 ttl=112 time=521 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=15 ttl=112 time=523 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=17 ttl=112 time=529 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=18 ttl=112 time=255 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=20 ttl=112 time=529 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=21 ttl=112 time=256 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=22 ttl=112 time=540 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=23 ttl=112 time=259 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=24 ttl=112 time=256 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=25 ttl=112 time=538 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=26 ttl=112 time=249 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=27 ttl=112 time=249 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=29 ttl=112 time=535 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=30 ttl=112 time=245 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=31 ttl=112 time=537 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=32 ttl=112 time=521 ms
\n^C
\n— bbcnews.com ping statistics —
\n33 packets transmitted, 25 received, 24% packet loss<\/strong>, time 32100ms
\nrtt min\/avg\/max\/mdev = 245.494\/387.271\/540.330\/135.008 ms<\/small><\/p>\n

This is actually quite a good one! I forgot the -n switch (so the lines aren’t too long to fit nicely in the blog!) the first time, and that was 50% packet loss. You can see the massive variation between times. Here’s a DiGi ping, taken about the same time:<\/p>\n

root@box0045:\/home\/sean# ping -n bbcnews.com
\nPING bbcnews.com (212.58.224.138) 56(84) bytes of data.
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=957 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=2 ttl=114 time=1456 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=3 ttl=114 time=736 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=4 ttl=114 time=698 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=5 ttl=114 time=736 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=6 ttl=114 time=574 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=7 ttl=114 time=536 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=8 ttl=114 time=690 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=9 ttl=114 time=632 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=10 ttl=114 time=549 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=11 ttl=114 time=671 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=12 ttl=114 time=633 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=13 ttl=114 time=592 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=14 ttl=114 time=672 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=15 ttl=114 time=692 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=16 ttl=114 time=551 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=17 ttl=114 time=692 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=18 ttl=114 time=694 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=19 ttl=114 time=573 ms
\n64 bytes from 212.58.224.138: icmp_seq=20 ttl=114 time=714 ms<\/small><\/p>\n

— bbcnews.com ping statistics —
\n20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% packet loss<\/strong>, time 19005ms
\nrtt min\/avg\/max\/mdev = 536.086\/702.613\/1456.054\/195.820 ms, pipe 2<\/small><\/p>\n

See? No packet loss! The times are large and there’s large variation between times because this is a cellular modem. Ping times and packet loss may not be of much interest to you, but if you want to read the news at http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/ and you have a choice of these two Internet connections, you’ll get a counter-intuitive result.<\/p>\n

My Streamyx connection is specified as 512Kbit\/s, EDGE is about 200Kbit\/s (I think). Using Streamyx, the BBC page ‘half’ appeared after a minute and 5 seconds. That half never completed. I gave up at 4 minutes. Using DiGi, the whole page appeared around 1 minute, with the pictures slowly appearing over the next 2 minutes. The page was fully loaded around 3 minutes.<\/p>\n

Those times sound appalling, and they are – I suspect the international links may be unusually slow today. the BBC News front page is also very, very ‘fat’, with lots of images to load – nearly half a Megabyte in total. I cleared my cache in between loads of the BBC News front page, so every little icon had to be loaded each time. If you visit the page a second time, it loads in under 20 seconds on DiGi and fails to load again on Streamyx.<\/p>\n

It is just like the old story of the tortoise and the hare. Streamyx is fast – when it works. It occasionally impresses me with its performance. You couldn’t ever say the same for DiGi EDGE – it’s physically a slow way to transfer data, there’s no getting away from that. But it never fails to deliver the goods. Eventually.<\/p>\n

– Update –<\/span><\/p>\n

It did cheer up for a bit, and was quite fast, up until lunchtime 2 days later<\/a>. And then it was unusable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I still can’t be bothered phoning this one in, it is after all just bad and not actually completely broken. It is also Sunday, so the weekend-workers at TM would probably rather tackle something really major. I mentioned a couple of nights ago that Streamyx was bad to some international sites, well it still is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[108,107,19,34,16,15],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-broadband","category-broken","tag-broadband","tag-broken","tag-malaysia","tag-network","tag-streamyx","tag-tm-net"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}