Beware the 1024 package

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brendon9x

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Two weeks ago, a nice lady from Telkom phoned to ask me if I would like to upgrade my line to 1024k. Given that I work mostly on UK based computers I decided to give it a try. Also, please note that I have the 4GB unshaped account, so I'm expecting to the best results money can buy before getting a diginet line (I have tried IS and UUNet but 4GB offered best speed and lowest latency).

Subjectively, I failed to notice a difference between my new 1024 and my old 512kb except on weekends so I installed the LineSpeed meter from tcpIQ.com. This program measures international bandwidth every two hours and records the results on a website. The results are interesting for a number of reasons.

Firstly, upload speed is rock solid with an average speed of 335kbits/sec (41.9KB/s) which I'm assuming means that Telkom is limiting the upload speed to 384 rather than the 256kbit/s they advertise.

Secondly, download speed varies wildly. Despite the fact that the unshaped account is Telkom's most expensive ADSL offering, the speeds vary from a miserly 102kbit/s to an acceptable 890kbit/s. The upsetting thing is the distribution of the results (click here). As you can see, more than half the samples taken are less than 300kbit/s. What's most upsetting, is that only 10% of the samples taken justify getting a 1024kbit line!. In fact, there seems little point at the moment getting anything faster than a 384kbit line. Anything else is about as useful as a four-carriage highway in Pofadder.

Obviously this doesn't apply to local traffic, but international traffic is what matters most me. After all, it is called the "World Wide Web". So, if you were considering getting a 1024kbit line and you asked my advice, I'd recommend holding off.

For anyone interested in more detailed analysis of these results, have a look at: http://www.tcpiq.com/tcpIQ/LineSpeed/Results/RenderChart/?Size=Normal&Id=PerUserDownloadDistributionSpeedChart&CountryId=196&UserId=176307. The page should be updating every two hours or so. Please bear in mind the GMT+1000 timezone used to display the times when looking at results. You'll need to subtract 8 hours to make sense of it and you'll also realise that the awesome performance reported on Mondays is actually Sunday's results in South Africa.

Regards,
Brendon McLean.
 
Also note that these results confirm what some users have been saying about upload speeds being higher than download speeds (international - not in the transparent proxy cache).
 
welcome to myadsl and thanks for the info!

what would be great was if you could also port your test results from before the upgrade?!
 
We have to remember that ADSL is a best effort service with no guarantees. I think you'll find it's that way anywhere in the world.
 
JUGGY said:
We have to remember that ADSL is a best effort service with no guarantees. I think you'll find it's that way anywhere in the world.
Click to expand...

We dont need to remember that, because thanks to telkom, we are reminded of it every time we access the internet.
 
If it's a 'best effort' gig, then at least SOME effort should be made to get the speeds they advertise. Or if not then tell everyone in the country they have a 24MBps line and the speed they ACTUALLY get is the 'Best Effort'

pah!
 
schitz011 said:
If it's a 'best effort' gig, then at least SOME effort should be made to get the speeds they advertise. Or if not then tell everyone in the country they have a 24MBps line and the speed they ACTUALLY get is the 'Best Effort'

pah!
Click to expand...

Yes, best effort should mean that it should be at the advertised speed at least 50+% of the time, or under "normal" conditions. Just another way telscum found to screw us.
 
Well my 1024KB line is doing fine. I get a constant 880KB connection. been downloading Solaris 10 and Redhat 9 isos since last night without any issues.
 
JUGGY said:
We have to remember that ADSL is a best effort service with no guarantees. I think you'll find it's that way anywhere in the world.
Click to expand...

Not the case - in many countries (ie not za) adsl consistently performs at the uppermost limits of the quoted speeds - and for business users there are SLA's.

'best effort service' is simply arse covering incompetence.
 
JUGGY said:
We have to remember that ADSL is a best effort service with no guarantees. I think you'll find it's that way anywhere in the world.
Click to expand...

This is a South African fallacy. I lived in the UK for four years and have had ADSL over there for 3 and my experience was that the speed was almost always as advertised. These tests only show a two week period, but in that time best effort equates to "about 10% of the time".

That site (tcpiq) makes interesting reading. You can compare South Africa to other countries. Try and and find a country with a worse average download speed. Really, its quite difficult. I was quite surprised to find that Afghanistan, Ghana, Egypt and Iraq have higher average download speeds. I'll concede that this benchmark isn't scientific and not everyone will believe it. But it does largely coincide with my subjective perceptions and many other users.

Regards,
Brendon.
 
Similar Best Effort

In fact no effort. This is seriously a joke. I have reported the matter to Telkom and all the techie could say was that international bandwidth is the problem and that I should hang in there because from time to time Telkom adds to the bandwidth and then I might get my advertised speeds. The jokers at Telkom are obviously waiting for the results of their 1 November increase to artificially make more bandwidth available. At least when we pay their exorbitant rates, we should be able to expect it to be at the speeds that we subscribe to?

Here is my link:
http://www.tcpiq.com/tcpIQ/LineSpee...ountryId=196&ConnectionId=11300&UserId=171868
 
I also almost always get an average of 700-800kb/s download speed althought upload is 21kb/s (not KB)
 
The only time I ever got ADVERTISED speeds on ADSL 1024 was when I had the Freeproxy from Clipse and when I test on the TELKOM site. The other cases were generally a fluke of very short duration. I am now on ADSL512 and my average downloads in not far worse than on ADSL1024. So the extra cost is not worth it. Due to the cap I download over SAT and thus save Telkom "badwidth" thus I wait much longer but thats life!
 
on 192 and 384 you actually (more often than not) get more than you pay for. runs at close to line speed i.e 320kbps and 512kbps respectively. on 512 and 1024 you get approximately what you pay for. which is why i would recommend anyone interested in adsl to go for the 384 package
 
The 384 package is definitly the best value for money - and if you lucky you could find yourself getting 512 speeds

I have used it for 6 months now and other than one period of about 10 days when my speed on the speedtests dropped to about 40kB/s I have averaged between 52 and 57kB/s
 
brendon9x said:
This is a South African fallacy. I lived in the UK for four years and have had ADSL over there for 3 and my experience was that the speed was almost always as advertised. These tests only show a two week period, but in that time best effort equates to "about 10% of the time".

That site (tcpiq) makes interesting reading. You can compare South Africa to other countries. Try and and find a country with a worse average download speed. Really, its quite difficult. I was quite surprised to find that Afghanistan, Ghana, Egypt and Iraq have higher average download speeds. I'll concede that this benchmark isn't scientific and not everyone will believe it. But it does largely coincide with my subjective perceptions and many other users.

Regards,
Brendon.
Click to expand...

south africans are being all types of ripped off but not enough people (with the correct skin colour) are compalining.
 
The nice lady from Telkom phoned me as well, wanting to inform me of their new 'fast' service. To this I replied that I mainly use the service for international browsing and gaming and asked her if she (Telkom) can guarantee me faster speeds on this new service.

She politely said no and went away....
 
I must say the 1024k service for me is exactly double the speed of my 512k, but I only get those speeds using a download manager that makes several connections to the same site. One connection gets slightly faster than a 512k line.
 
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