Thirdworld Bandwidth

I'm from Trinidad and most people here get their Internet accesses from TSTT, the old POTS monopoly which is now a part of Cable and Wireless. Sure there are other providers like Lisa Communications or Green Dot however, they seem to be under-funded and quality of service is bad. Service tends to degrade as they add more customers as they don't have the money to upgrade the infrastructure. They also rely largely on VSAT technology while TSTT /CW owns the most of the pipe comming into Trinidad (Americas I/II). These guys TTCS provide and overview of the state of things. It's a bit dated and they don't actually rate the providers.
Why is everybody in T&T always sitting on the fence?

On the horizon there is FLOW the cable monopoly. FLOW probably has the money to compete with TSTT. They are currently rolling out the service in selected areas however, the packages/prices are not really that great. I mean they are better that TSTT but kinda disappointing!!! The packages range from 512 kbs/128 kbs for TT$ 390 per month to 2 Mbs/512 kbs - TT$ 1,149 per month. I was expecting to be able to get the 2 Mbs/512 kbs package for around TT$300 -TT $ 600 per month. This would be what I expect to be the standard markup over the US to be. And remember the US has one of the highest broadband costs in the OECD.

Interestingly, according to this paper the total capacity of submarine cable coming into Trinidad is about 43Gbps and the country only has about 10k broadband subscribers. Meanwhile we have this
"A Swedish grandmother has become the fastest surfer on the web with a 40Gbps"
story hitting the newswires last week

Testing
Anyway, I've been running into situations last week where clients/friends are not so sure if they a getting what they are paying for. Here are some sites where you can do a bandwidth test to see if you are getting what you are paying for. Here are some results for with a client based in Port-of-Spain who's paying for 1 Mbs/256 kbs

• speedtest.net - Uses the same technology and the speakeasy test below but has more servers outside the US. - 863 kbs/208 kbs Curacao 840 kbs/205 kbs Miami
• speakeasy.net - this is probably the most well know test 829 kbs/201 kbs test servers are located in the US only
• wugetnet - This is a file upload/download test. Results were erratic and tend to reflect realworld factors (see below)
  
• 2007-07-23:9:08:00 - 459 kbs/204 kbs
• 2007-07-23:9:15:00 - 131 kbs/247 kbs

The last result is illustrates how real world factors impinge on performance like

• TSTT is not connected to the Internet backbone
• TSTT is having trouble be managing his core network
• There is high latency
  
• TSTT DNS lookups are slow

Anyway, if you have experience with the other local providers drop us some comments
Later
Chris

I'm back

I am starting to post in this blog again.

The original idea was to use pyTIC as a development blog for the pyTIC project

However, you all know, that i've decided to try to do wait and see how things go with the scipy - TimeSeries project.

I am thinking the we can still contribute in the area of relational storage

Anyway, i wanted to blog about two of the projects I'm looking at right now.

I've not really started to use them but !!!

WebLab

WebLab is a web front end for the excellent Matplotlib library.

I like that its a web-based client and i can copy the UI for my time series database project

Of course he's storing files on the server and using cheeryPY

ext

This seems to be an excellent replacement for openrico especially  livegrids. 

It seems that OpenRico has lost a lot of momentum. 

I mean there is the 2.0 stuff but the whole thing seems disjointed

More importantly I found there where serious design flaws (not just bugs). For example supposed you have a grid with delete checkboxes. The user selects some and then scrolls .  The grid updates and clears all previous selections, Also I found that my users just did no get stuff like the Accordion

My Photo

Hi

They say they want to see a picture of me on my profile.

I'm not so sure about this but  here goes

Some Tools

I'm using this post to experiment with MarsEdit which i may use for updating my blog.
Interestingly after 3 years of VI/VIM I am trying to find an IDE.
The main contenders are WingWare Personal and Komodo 4.
Jonathan Ellis feels that Komodo 4 is the clear winner. Here are my views so far after a couple of days testing

• UI - Komodo 4 is a bit slicker and WingWare runs on OSX only as an X11 application. Actually this is not such a big drawback as you may think as the OSX X11 server is pretty well done so that WingWare almost looks native


• Komodo 4 wins the code completion since i can see the argument parameters


• I like the WingWare shell and the fact that you can select text to run in the shell


• Komodo Edit has no debugger while WingWare Personal has a pretty good debugger


• Costs - I know i've got to get a commercial version of the tool i choose. This is especially true for WingWare as the EULA prohibits use for profit. WingWare is cheaper. ($179 vs $245)


• I'm not so sure how well WingWare supports SVN. Kmodo 4 claims it does

As for MARSEdit OK but the spellchecker is a bit flakey. At least i was able to connect to my blog. I could not do this with Ecto!!!
Ok i've actually had to post this using the web control pannel. The MarsEdit forums are blaming blogger.
I think i'll stick with the web control pannel

Welcome

Hi this a blog i created to express my view on things pythonic and more importantly to document my work on the pyTIC project.
pyTIC - Python Time Intelligence Components is a set of tools for working with Time Series data commonly found in Economics and Finance.

pyTIC is implemented in python and takes advantage of some cool libraries which do most of the hardwork. These include:

• python-dateutil
• Numpy
• SQLAlchemy/SQLSoup

I hope to have something out by next-week as regards to date ranges, calendars and date arithmetic