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Is iCable telling me the truth?

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  1. #1

    Join Date
    Feb 2008
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    Mid-levels
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    Is iCable telling me the truth?

    Okay guys, I know there are plenty of topics which covers the comparison between the two providers, but I just need to ask for your opinion on this without reading through numerous threads to find an answer.

    So the other day I asked PCCW for their prices on residential broadband service and the sales told me that the maximum speed my building (new apartment which I am moving into in May) will allow is 3MB. Right now, I get a max. speed of 7.2MB (not really but that's what Vodafone is advertising) with Vodafone and the speed sucks. I can't imagine having half the speed when I surf the internet if I choose to go with PCCW's services next.

    Also, the sales person told me that he checked and PCCW is the only internet service provider in my building and that I don't need to be bothered looking elsewhere.

    Refusing to believe the PCCW sales, I picked up the phone and called iCable today and the sales rep told me that iCable can offer 130MB in my building. Is that possible?

    Now I am not a computer person so please spare me the technical lectures/feedbacks. I just want to know if iCable is lying just to get me to commit to their 2 years contract or whether I should just settle for 3MB with PCCW until they decide to upgrade their system in my building?

    From reading some of the threads, I came across an ISP called NetFront and I gave them a ring as well and they told me that if PCCW can't offer me a speed faster than 3MB, they can't do anything about it either.

    Anyway, back to my question... is iCable lying to me?

    Please help. Thank you.


  2. #2

    Join Date
    Mar 2007
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    they all lie all the time.


  3. #3

    Join Date
    Jun 2005
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    iCable has a completely separate infrastructure to PCCW. If they are in your building (and they are in most) then they can offer you service. Be aware though that with iCable you share bandwidth all the way from your building whereas with PCCW it's dedicated as far as their exchange building. What that means is that you are far more prone to localised congestion on iCable and reliant on their capacity planning at a much finer level of detail than is necessary with PCCW. In my expeirence (somewhat dated now with iCable) PCCW tends to slow down much less than iCable at peak times (10pm-midnight).

    In both cases, the bottleneck is most often shared international bandwidth anyway, so unless you are downloading from sites within Hong Kong you will generally see little benefit from speeds much over 10Mbit/s in my experience.


  4. #4

    Join Date
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    As with everything else Marketing will always twist facts. Some basics

    a) The MB figure could refer to speeds or the amount of data. The former is then MB/sec while the latter applies mostly to wireless connections nowdays (if there is no cap then its a unlimited data connection)

    b) Download speeds is different from upload speeds (the 3M, 100M etc refer to download)

    c) Your connection could be shared or dedicated. Shared means while you have a 100MB speed connection, the speed shared by everyone in your building.

    Its not a tech lecture but if you intend to compare different vendors you need to make sure you are comparing apples to apples.

    130MB sounds fishy... never heard of that figure before for speed.


  5. #5

    Join Date
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    I have i-Cable 130mb (on paper). 130mb is relatively commonly advertised speed with DOCISS 3.0 cable modems. In the US I think I was advertised 110mb with the same Motorola-brand modems. I-Cable is now using the Motorola modems that are being rolled out in many parts of the US (Comcast) with DOCSIS 3 which makes it helpful in troubleshooting as there are many folks talking about them on the net.

    Now, do you really get that? Do you really get whatever is advertised by any of these guys? I think the fine print of all the ISPs here say "only to Hong Kong websites". Using the popular (but not totally accurate site) speedtest.net I can regularly get 60mbps from the servers in Hong Kong during the day (right now it is 30mbps but I think the kids are donwloading something in the other room). Going over the oceans to say the US or UK it drops to 4 or 5 mbps, though usually quite less. Quite a difference.

    At some point everyone's connection is shared. It could be the number of users in your building sharing a cable connection back to iCable, or it could be the number of DSL users in the phone company's central office sharing the same connection out to the net, or it could be all the users of a particular ISP sharing the limited overseas bandwidth available. Your speed is going to be constrained by the weakest link. In some houses with very old routers, you can even start to run into problems with WAN-LAN throughput ports in your router which maybe less than the current offerings from PCCW or ICable (my old firewall had a 7mb limit). Here is a good breakdown of WAN-LAN of many popular routers.

    Router Performance Comparison Charts - WAN to LAN Throughput - SmallNetBuilder

    So, in the end, is it worth it? I have the 130mb package. I get maybe get half of that to Hong Kong servers and even less to the US. Still, I'm able to stream video from the US or UK (even when using a VPN) and websites load "fast enough" for me. I occasionally notice some speed slowdown when I'm working with some databases in the US that load large queries before displaying them at my end. My wife uses a CITRIX connection to her servers here in HK so having the added bandwidth for HK only helps there. If it was just me poking around websites overseas, it is probably a bit of overkill.

    You might want to ask folks in your building what they are using and whether they are having any problems or success. Is HKBB or HGC an option where you live?

    edit: One more anecdotal bit. I've had relatively good service from iCable over the last year. The original install took 6 hours from the time I ordered service until the time it was installed. I had one outage after 6 months which turned out to be a frayed cable that was pulled out of the wall by an overzealous cleaning lady. My second outage, which required customer service last week, lasted about 6 hours (time I called until the time they could get a techie to my house). There was some noise in the line and he had to go out into the stairwell and work on something out there. Got a nice screen shot of the web-based control panel he was using to look at the 'node' or whatever it was called out in the hall. I've had other minor outages that never lasted more than a few moments--not even worth calling the support number.

    Of course, your mileage may vary when it comes to customer service. Some have horror stories.

    Last edited by penguinsix; 22-02-2011 at 09:09 PM.

  6. #6

    Join Date
    Feb 2008
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    thanks so much guys. very helpful!