Rejoice fellow Mauritians!
Once again, we’re below average in something important: the speed of Internet in our beloved country.
According to the latest quarterly report by Akamai which is summarised in this post, the average global (i.e. worldwide) download speed is now 2.9Mbps.
Most Mauritians I know still subscribe to Mauritius Telecom’s MyT service at 1Mbps (I do…) which costs around Rs 1099 per month. Only few of us can afford the 2Mbps and 4/Mbps (available at around Rs 1649 and Rs 2649 per month!).
This means that, for a majority of Mauritians, we have only one third of the average global (i.e. worldwide) download speed others are having. This is abysmal in our age of reliance on the Internet for everything we do: learning, working and entertainment.
Hurray!
and the best latency we can get is 119ms to singapore and 250ms for adsl in somewhere in europe!
We can’t even do anything about it.
True. Latency is another major issue too. I suppose that all Mauritians who want to participate in online games are somewhat penalised.
What is the maximum allowed latency for a gamer to play online with a certain comfort ?
Hi Avinash,
What a coincidence. Just blogged about my findings on internet speed recently… focusing on Emtel Fixed Broadband and Mobile Internet:
http://jochen.kirstaetter.name/blog/general/test-your-internet-connection.html
http://jochen.kirstaetter.name/blog/general/test-your-internet-connection-emtel-mobile-internet.html
It’s too sad… ;-(
1Mbps is wishful and advertised speed. Most of the time we get half of that if not worse particularly at peak time aka 5pm-10pm.
Meanwhile at the same time a business package has the same speed all day round making the real culprit being the contention ratio used for residential customers.
Our real issue is no competition, Emtel is just a figurehead for residential customers so until we get good FTTH or heck even VDSL we’ll be stuck in the same place
@ Avinash, latency is important also for people working with stocks as well as for cloud computing with remote desktop etc. Although yes for gamers it is quite important (I game)
@Pramod It depends on what games you play. It has no bearing on a turned based game.
If you’re playing a FPS (Counterstrike etc) then it’s VERY important and should be below 100 possibly around 50-70 if you want to be competitive
If you’re playing a MMO game type with no action/aiming then 150 is adequate
if you’re playing a RTS game then 100 ish depending on your level of control would be ok.
@Avinash, since consumer protection entities don’t even care about internet speeds/fees (beyond the one time that MT ignored the order to half their price) maybe it’s time the MRU internet community grouped up, organised information sessions to make sure we’re all aware of what’s going on and what the implications are (mainly what we’re losing beyond having to wait more for downloads) and go forward from there.
I forgot to add, this worldwide speed is skewed downwards because of the lack of population density in a lot of countries.
The general rule being if you have low density population, you’ll get slower internet than higher density countries
Been reviewing my own usage and internet needs now that MT, BT, DCL-Alice are developing new networks. At this time, I am an Emtel Wimax SO2 package user. I also have the Emtel 4G dongle, sadly Emtel have informed me that they do not plan to upgrade my area for 4G so I am stuck with HSPA+. As for Wimax they will not offer higher speeds above the 2Mbps package unless you go for the business ILP package which is way too expensive for the private user. So waiting to see what others will offer in the next months.
How I miss my Belgium internet cable (coax) connection which was a package at 20Mbps some 5 years ago. Today they have FTTH, typical package cost: 50Mbps download for Rs1428/month or 60Mbps download for Rs1876/month or 120Mbps download for Rs2733. A student package 12Mbps (no limit) Rs918/month.
Hiya, there has been some sort of mechanisation of the whole competitive process in the ‘communication’ industry. The watchdog ICTA is not doing its job properly. I am sorry to say that. We cannot wait years for number portability approval, years for speed increase approval and years for 8 number relocation (what is the urge to do that anyway ?).
I have not seen major improvement in the telco industry, there need to be some shakeup. They are mostly focus on postpaid cards and not even remotely interested in mauturing the data market. The market is a duopoly with very few innovations. It reminds me of the case study of ATT prior to breakup.
Maybe something as radical as a legal breakup of the telco industry into ‘Internet-data’ and ‘cellular’ is required. We may not have the capacity to have the similar industry type as europe, where all is under one umbrella company.
hans.
Interesting read: http://www.defimedia.info/dimanche-hebdo/dh-actualites/item/33380-et-ce-scandale-la-ii.html
Thanks for sharing. Yeah, the situation is catastrophic given the kind of profits Mauritius Telecom is making. Things have to change.
Thanks for the clarification Nicolas. :)
I hear we will soon have fiber to the home from Orange, even they are starting from the center of the island. Maybe then we can be ranked a bit among average. :p
However I am a bit sceptical about the price that will be offered. :S
It would be nice if we could have the transparency about the cost of implementation of the different projects from MT.
The fact that we can’t watch YouTube videos around 20:00 is killing me. How are family members supposed to learn new things together?
I’m very unhappy having to pay for suboptimal services…