broadband internet connection needed

[pin]

My building is a Henderson development and I think Towngas are also a subsidiary of Henderson. The 2 years free service was just one of the incentives from the developer to get me to buy the flat.

Anyway, I am fine for 2 years. Its actually quite a nice service because its a direct ethernet plug on the wall and I have no modem to worry about. There is some home automation system above the ceiling in the kitchen and when the guy came to connect it he was playing around in the ceiling.

I just hope after 2 years the price comes down a lot or I am free to get 100MB service from somewhere else (or maybe 1GB by then)

Yes, you are right. I looked into it in a bit more detail and Towngas offer the service to Henderson buildings. Very nice for you (grrrrrr in reality). Quite envious, would love to have that sort of connection speed.

[bdw]

Well, go spend millions of dollars on a flat and then you can get free internet.

[MovingIn07]

I will be using it for VPNing into work (London), so need a solid stable, low latency line for RDP access and VoIP.

I have the PCCW 8M service connected to a couple of PC's on our boat, and the smartone which I use on my mac. Sometimes I don't bother to plug the smartone stick in, and then I wonder why the internet is so slow .. then I realised (as I just did) and plug it in and connect and find I get a better speed. Obviously, some of the slowness might just be the other PC using the connection, but it does highlight the limitations of the 8M service and the pluses of the smartone service - which I use for Voip and corporate VPN no problem.

Having said that, the company pays for the smartone so I'm less worried about the cost! But it wasn't too bad - less than 200 a month if I recall correctly on a 12 month contract.

[gonwan]

PCCW website says 30M fibre is $256, whereas the 8M is 398. Thats why i wanted Fibre.

I'm happy to go on a 12 month contract, so if that brings it down to around $200. Also they have a form which i can present to the building management to get them connected to PCCW Fibre, and they say i can migrate to fibre as soon as its in, probably starting a new contract..

I definitely would have preferred HKBN, but they have no timeline on when the building will be connected.

My building is a 20 year old one, no HD and even normal TV reception is poor.... bdw i'm envious !!

[bdw]

Sorry I thought you meant the 100MB fibre.

The 30MB plan for $256 aint bad. I had that previously and I was getting the quoted download speeds. But I dont think it is true fibre all the way to your apartment. What I mean is they still give you a modem and it still connects through a regular copper phone line. So obviously this isnt fibre. I think it may be fibre to the building and then VDSL to your apartment.

[gonwan]

Hey guys,

I'm here now and have been using PCCW 8M standard broadband @ $220 a month for about 2 weeks now.

Download speeds are good, but latency to London is an issue. Pingtest says:


but pings to my London server is averages around 500ms.

Will using PCCW business broadband services reduce this ?

thanks

[robertlempriere]

Here are my results from my PCCW biz line;

[PDLM]

No, not much. Basic physics would tell you that the information can't travel faster than the speed of light, which is 300,000,000 metres per second. The roundtrip distance to London is about 30,000,000 metres (about 30,000km - the cables don't go on anything like the great circle route). So the absolute theoretical minimum ping is 100ms. Add in the fact that in fact signals in cables might only travel at 70% of the speed of light and you get to 140ms. Even the very fastest routers each add a few milliseconds, plus every transmission system encoding that it goes through is going to add some more.

Clearly PCCW is delivering the traffic to the edge of its network in the UK and back in somewhat under 300ms (since you get to the Maidenhead server in that time). Even theoretically I can't see that coming down by much, certainly not under, say, 200ms. Then you clearly have at least 200ms beyond PCCW's control (because your server is 500ms when the Maidenhead one is 300ms) so at the very most you might be able to get it to 400ms in total, and even that's unlikely since I doubt that PCCW Business Broadband gets any different routing across their international core.


PS @gonwan Since you are apparently working in the IT field I do find it quite sad that you seem unaware of stuff like this.

[PDLM]

Here are my results from my PCCW biz line

Which is not helpful at all because Taichung is 450 miles away and London is 6000 miles away. What happens when you test to London?

But for what it's worth, here is the result to that same Taichung server from my 6MB/s home Netvigator line:

[Raccon]

Here are my results from my PCCW biz line;

Psst, neither Taichung nor Xiamen are anywhere near London.