.: ShaolinTiger - Kung-Fu Geekery :.

Ah so many posts to write, Tmnut is playing silly buggers the last few days.

Most of the time I can't access Flickr, can't access any sites hosted on blogspot, sometimes can't connect to any Google services, can't connect to MSN..

And when it's all working it's so terribly slow, even surfing is a pain.

This is what we get when we pay for broadband eh?

I wish they would stop selling and marketing and start investing back in the infrastructure, let's upgrade the international links PLEASE.

Let's get regular trans-atlantic pings of less than 300ms please!

I've noticed recently they are super efficient when it comes to cutting your line too, if you don't pay by the day stated on the bill they really cut you off within a few hours and you have to pay the RM10 reconnection charge.

They are really rather organised when it comes to collecting the money for their half-arsed service.

If only they paid so much attention to the actual service they are supposed to be providing, customer service orientation is not something that is prevalent in Malaysia anyway.

I guess things might change if Streamyx is not the monopoly, if they eventually unbundle the local loop things might change...

Might I say, with great trepidation.

At least it with allow for some smaller guys to come in and run service based companies rather than just sell sell sell, typical of any monopoly.

It was the same in UK when British Telecom held the ADSL power-card, until they unbundled the local loop, the service and pricing was much the same as Streamyx.

Legislation forced them to surrender the monopoly though and now UK is a country with extremely affordable, very high quality ADSL. Most of my friends are using 8mb ADSL, which really gives 8MB internationally...economically they pay around RM120 per month for the service.

And here we are paying RM88 for a 1MB line which only gives 1MB into the Tmnet network, perhaps on a good day getting 300-500kbps internationally.

When is the last time I downloaded something on my Streamyx at over 100k/s? I don't even remember.

1MB should give downloads of around 115k/s ideally.

I doub't I'll get the TMnet CEO coming to my house, but still...

Seems like some people don't know what a Ping is, which is fair enough really..

Some know what it is, sort of, but don't know how to intepret the results.

So here's a quick run-down.

Good Ping

Here's what my work ping to google.com looks like now:

As you can see, it's pretty constant around the 300ms mark, with no "Request timed out".

Bad Ping

When I was in Brunei and people were using Peer to Peer software in the hotel, my connection looked like this:

As you can see there are many "Request timed out" and high ping times.

Ok so how do I interpret this?

As you can see in the first either picture there are multiple similar lines in the format:

Reply from 64.233.187.99: bytes=32 time=300ms TTL=241

Reply from THE SERVER YOU PINGED bytes=SIZE OF PING time=PING TIME TTL=IGNORE

A ping is basically a packet containing a bunch of junk (1-10 and a-z) or something like that, a packet is just a small peice of data sent over the Internet.

When another machine receives your ping packet, it will send back a reply, the purpose of the ping is to time this whole process.

That's the time= part shown above, the time taken for the packet you sent to get a reply.

So it's a basic metric for the quality of service your Internet connection is giving you.

Request Timed Out

If you see the "Request timed out" shown in the Bad Ping section above, it means you got no reply at all, which is called a dropped packet. This is bad, and means there is a failure somewhere, and either your packet isn't reaching the destination, or you aren't getting a reply.

Ping Times

500ms = 1/5 second (1000ms = 1 second).

• A normal time for streamyx would be 250-300ms
• At peak times it seems to be around 500-600ms
• When it's really bad its 800-1200ms
• If it's above 1000ms trying restarting your connection

Ok, so how do I Ping?

Ok to ping something, go to the Start - Run menu option and type cmd:

Then press enter, you'll see a DOS prompt come up.

In the prompt type:

ping google.com -t

And press enter.

You'll see the ping running, the -t argument tells it to ping constantly, so it won't stop untill you press CTRL+C.

It'll then give you a summary of the Ping statistics for that session.

You can also try pinging yahoo.com, I usually get slightly better times for Yahoo! than Google.

If you ping streamyx.com you should get something like 20-50ms.

If you want to read more about Ping and some of the options, check Wikepedia - Ping.