Connexions? We have connections (yet another update)

Update. Partially restored optic fibre cables:

Flag North Asia Loop, owned by India's Reliance Communications Ltd.; Reach North Asian Loop, owned by Hong Kong's PCCW Ltd. and Australia's Telstra Corp.; Se-Me-We3, owned by a group including Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. and France Telecom SA; and APCN and APCN2, owned by operators including China Telecom Corp. and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom Co. A segment of Asia Netcom Corp.'s EAC cable system will be repaired today . . . Ofta did not receive the repair status on the seventh cable, C2C, owned by C2C Group Ltd . . .

Source: Bloomberg

Connexions? Noun, chiefly British: dictionary

During the day it's not too bad, but of an evening . . . of an evening this Netvigator 3MB DSL customer experiences speeds you'd get with a 56k dial-up.

Of an evening, it's been like that since connections were patched in the wake of the earthquake south of Taiwan on 26 December 2006 which damaged and/or severed seven fibre-optic cables.

Today, Mister Bijou did some DSL speedtesting to see what's what -- in the knowledge that connection speeds are affected by time of day (here and there), level of traffic, the local node, computer hardware and software settings, and (probably) the waxing and the waning of the moon. To name but a few.

For those who may be interested, Mister Bijou's operating platform is Windows XP . . . with super-tweaked Internet connection settings.

The tweaking thanks to Speedguide TCP Optimizer. Recommended. But Mac users are out of luck. It's for Windows' users. It's free. More information: Speedguide

Now, speed. The first number is download speed, the second refers to upload speed. The first set of tests were done around 4.30pm (Hong Kong time):

London: 2396/205 kpbs
NYC: 2345/206 kbps
Los Angeles: 2356/208 kpbs
Hong Kong: 1435/531 kpbs
Yokohama: 3091/398 kpbs
Sydney: 774/197 kpbs
Singapore: 3198/518 kpbs

It's the download speeds we are really interested in. They are, all in all, fairly good speeds, excepting Sydney. However, Mister Bijou is puzzled as to why Hong Kong did not come out top.

Now, around 10pm:

London: 37/45 kpbs
NYC: 47/82 kbps
Los Angeles: 62/76 kpbs
Hong Kong: 3027/531 kpbs
Yokohama: 3093/120 kpbs
Sydney: 495/195 kpbs
Singapore: 3193/497 kpbs

Anyway, those are some numbers which show how slow. For London and New York City, a 56k connection and modem would have been sufficient.

Which is a real drag, literally. For the US hosts many of the websites Mister Bijou visits and access to many websites in the UK and continental Europe is routed via the US.

Mister Bijou tried out several speedtesters and got similar results. There are numerous sites for speed testing . . . google 'em. The speedtests above were via: speedtest

Is anyone else experiencing similar slowdowns?

Word is, it will be middle to end of February 2007 before PCCW's Netvigator isp gets back to the DSL high speeds which were previously customary. Further details: Hong Kong Standard.

Happy surfing!