Broadband speeds: Same story in KL too

Posted by Chanuka Wattegama on December 12, 2007 / 3 Comments

Perhaps this might make those who continuously complain about the broadband quality in South Asia happy. Sometimes things are not too different in relatively more advanced places. When tested, at 1200 midnight the wireless broadband connection provided by a star class hotel in KL recorded a download speed of 54.5 kbps and an upload speed of 144 kbps. These speeds are far below than what some of the South Asian operators offer.

3 Comments

Sanjana Hattotuwa
December 13, 2007, 3:40 pm
Hi Chanuka,

Using the same programme as you on Vista I ran some rough and ready speed tests on my hotel network and the GK III wifi at KLCC and got some very different results.

From my hotel at 8.20am (13th Dec) using a wired LAN, the results were:

Download speed 869 Kbps (socket test)
Upload speed 582 Kbps (socket test)
Quality of service 64 %
Maximum pause 197 ms
Round trip time 289 ms

From the KLCC at 10.42am (13th Dec) using the GK3 wifi connection, the results where:

Download speed 273 Kbps (socket test)
Upload speed 239 Kbps (socket test)
Quality of service 60 %
Maximum pause 670 ms
Round trip time 284 ms

These seem much faster than what you were able to get off-peak, so I suspect that your hotel may be to blame?

Cheers,

Sanjana
chanuka
December 13, 2007, 7:36 pm
Hi Sanjana,

Thanks for your detailed reply and the effort you have taken.

Yes, it would be unfair for me to say the broadband speed in KL is low everywhere. Most probably my case might be an exception rather than norm. Still that proves even at places like KL the operators not necessarily keep their word – at least in some cases.

I am sure the fault could not have been at the user end (hotel). The only possible way for bandwidth to go down at user end is excessive sharing of the link. I do not think many might have been surfing at 12 midnight. (The reason why I wanted test right at that time)

BTW, today morning I got much better results, in par with second set of yours.
chanuka
December 14, 2007, 7:59 am
At 10.30 hrs today I got 359 kpbs download and 1.38 Mbps upload speeds using the same link.

Pretty impressive. Wonder why it drops off peak.

.