Interesting, I seem to have the fastest download speed so far, over 5MB/s and that's far away (almost in Ko Long) from our single microwave link to HK Island at the top of Po Wah Yuen (?)
Great for downloading stuff but not such great speed for uploading stuff to this website at just 0.3Mb/s...

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It's not the distance from the microwave link, but how much wire between you and the DSLAM.


But that's probably at the same location, at the exchange at Po Wah Yuen.
(Presumably, if you were paying for the maximum speed, you would come closest to getting it at Po Wah Yuen or Tai Peng).

DSL only works for a couple of km radius -- no Pak Kokkers have tested yet, would like to know their speed.

Most of us are connect by ADSL -- "Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line", and the "Asymmetric" means the upload speed is different than download, pretty much all capped at 300k.

A friend is waiting for his SmarTone wireless broadband to be activated, when it is I'll run a test from there.

Mmmm - my Netvigator HSPA 3G connection is the worst by far. I will test at another time to see if this is an abberation.

I read on another forum that if you burst through a preset limit (about 500Mb per month) on Smartone, they unilaterally reduce your bandwidth. Not sure if it is true - but it is worth watching out for.

I think my bandwidth is so low on Netvigator Mobile because they do not support HSPA on Lamma - I am probably getting 3G speed.

Was that the "Mobile" or the new "Home" plan?



Of course, that's just adspeak, we'll have to see what they do in practice. But you could use up 500 MB in a couple of hours of streaming, so it would be pretty stupid if it was capped. I don't think any home broadband in HK is capped.


Their T&C:


I sent them an email a few weeks ago asking to explain this and if they had a cap, just got a reply:

Moved from the Speedtest thread:



Help how?
Won't make any difference to download speed. The URL is translated to an IP before you make the connection. Once you have the IP it's out of the picture.


If you have your PC set up normally, when it initially logs on to the DHCP server, it gets an IP and the addresses of its DNS servers.

I myself use OpenDNS rather than my ISP's as it seems more reliable. A DNS error gives you things like "site not found" not a slowdown.

Do a "traceroute" and you can see a difference. My torrents were getting abysmally slow with OpenDNS.

Repeat question:

Does anyone have the DNS server addresses for Netvigator?

I find that fascinating.

How does DNS affect the routing? All a DNS server does is return an IP number, not a route.

And as I understand torrents, it purely uses IP numbers, so no DNS server is involved.

You can set up static DNS in your own PC, in the hosts file, and DNS servers won't be called at all. This is common way to block nasty sites, defining them to 127.0.0.1, for instance. And no information about routing is in the hosts file.

Your PC sends a packet to the ISP server (the gateway), and from there each server decides how to send it on its way to the addressed IP. It can be a different route every packet, theoretically.

As for Netvigator's name servers, see
http://whois.domaintools.com/netvigator.com
NS3.NETVIGATOR.COM 218.102.23.228
NS4.NETVIGATOR.COM 203.198.7.66

Are these the ones set when you use DHCP?

Try typing "ipconfig /all" at a command line, this works in most versions of Windows, and I think there is also ipconfig or maybe netstat in OSX.

-- note the Speedtest thread is exclusively for speedtest results, discussion goes here.

As for Pacific, I don't use Bittorrent but I do download a lot of stuff, and my daughter watches a lot of Youtube and the like.

Sometimes it gets very slow, in the evening, but I can't say if it's due to Lamma bandwidth being limited (we all go through the same microwave link), the ISP, or further upstream.

But I'm cheap and have the 1.5M plan. Another $10 will get you 3M, which I might go for, though I don't really need it. I don't think anyone can get 6M here, (one reason I started the speedtest thread was to see what the real maximum was) so no point in paying for that.

(Meanwhile in Kowloon my sister in law is getting Hutchison broadband, 30M for $119 month...)

But back to the question: One reason I stick with Pacific is that they don't screw you around like PCCW, where you can get a good deal but only if you bargain for it and take care not to let your contract roll over to a "standard" (expensive) rate.
Pacific just advertises their rates on their site and that's it. No special offers you need a salesman to sign off on.

And physically we're on the same wires as PCCW here, so you should get exactly the same service. (Except of course, no NOW TV.) The changeover just involves resetting your passwords in your router.

The results page has several PCCW users getting over 5, but I can't see Pacnet results from people who have more than a 3M subscription. :/
Price is no object since it's all getting claimed on expenses, so I might sign up for 6M anyway.

The big mystery in my life at the moment is the presence of an unsecured wireless network somewhere very near my house that seems to get several times more bandwidth than I do on my local network, despite also being on PCCW. What's with that, I wonder?

As above, we're on the same wires, so I don't think PCCW can be inherently faster, unless they were choking Pacnet, but there woud be a big stink if they did that.



You selected a HK server (probably belongs to PCCW), not LA. So that will obviously be faster. Choose LA and try again.

duh, silly me. Well, it's still faster (2Mbps), just not by as much.

Guys any update here on Smartone vs Netvigator?

I'm looking to terminate Netvigator and get Smartone for the cheaper price and the extra phone line. I'm at Sha Po Old

Probably not available there, but you can call and ask them to check your address for coverage.
Email customer_service@smartone-vodafone.com

My web browsing speed, especially loading any web pages, has slowed down to a crawl these last days, 24 hours a day, not just during Worldcup games.

The Speedtest still seems OK - about 1.9Mb/s even though I got over 5Mb before - file downloads and streaming radio or video are still OK, but loading even local, text-only web pages can take minutes instead of seconds.

Anybody got similar experiences recently? Netvigator tech support hasn't been much help so far...

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I moved to Lamma recently and my smartone box was really slow. Vodafone sent an engineer immediately who ran some tests and gave me an extra aerial. They later phoned me and said that as they could not increase the signal to the island they were going to cancel my contract.

After trying to arrange a pccw installation and getting the worst customer service I have ever received, I phoned vodafone and said I would rather have better customer service than reception. I have kept the slower smartone connection and excellent customer service, rather than suffer the idiots from pccw.

Please post your results in the Speedtest thread.

There are more alternatives to PCCW all the time.
A friend has "One2free" HSPA (wireless) broadband; quite okay though not the fastest. He also tried Vodafone but they wouldn't activate his router as they said the signal was too weak.

But I'm hanging out for HGC's fibre broadband -- they've been laying cable around YSW so obviously will soon be offering their service here, which should blow away DSL or wireless for reliability and speed.

If you are handy, you could get (or even make) a better antenna and put it on your roof (or an outside wall) to boost your signal.

See http://www.rfshop.com.au/Blogs/tabid/64 ... fault.aspx
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1195127
http://www.radiospecialists.com.au/ante ... 20yagi.htm

So-Net sold out to PCCW several years ago.
About the only other choice for DSL is Pacific.
However, all DSL broadband uses the same network, provided by PCCW. So the speed should be identical, as long as PCCW isn't playing any dirty tricks.

The only other possibility now is HSPA, using 3G wireless. Of these, it seems that SmarTone only has decent coverage around Yung Shue Long.

One2free recently started a service here; seems to have better coverage, and at $149/month is fairly cheap.
http://one2free.hkcsl.com/jsp/o2f_next_g/home_broadband/charges_and_subscription/charges_and_subscription.jsp
But the speed is about 2 MB.

I'm waiting to see what HGC is up to; they have been laying fibre along the path from the beach (presumably to the power station) and Main Street. It seems likely they will be offering cable broadband here soon. Currently they offer 100M for $99/month, so that would be sweet.
http://www.threebb.com.hk/eng/superbroadband.html