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