Massive Improvement In Speeds - Sophon Cat

[RandomSand]

I've noticed a massive improvement in speeds the last two weeks from SophonBB in Pattaya

Seems like CAT are passing through their new package's speeds onto existing usernames and that includes Sophon customers. Just as well; or Sophon customers would migrate to CAT directly.

Saying this, it seems like I'm getting better speeds from some parts of the world than others - and it varies with the time of day.

US servers - particularly the east coast - are bursting upto 15mb/s for me - although it slows down to "regular" speeds during peak hours... The EU generally seems to be limited to 1-2mb/s.

Are others getting similar difference in speeds- depending on the website/servers location - as noted above ??

(I'm on 2:1 prem. login btw).

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Edited February 15, 2013 by RandomSand

[BlackPuddingBertha]

I'm getting 11mbs both inside and outside of Thailand since a week or so ago, on a basic (non-premium) 4mbs account. So I would say that Sophon/CAT have probably just turned the throttling off by mistake (and will probably turn it back on again when they realise what they have done).

As has always been the case for me with Sophon, bandwidth is generally much better to the US than to Europe, though there was a significant improvement in the routing to parts of Europe a month or two ago, long before the overall speed improvement.

[Naam]

test results are fake. it shows triple my actual speed.

[BlackPuddingBertha]

test results are fake. it shows triple my actual speed.

Yes and no. The test results aren't fake (what would be the point?) but they can be manipulated/affected by proxies and cacheing servers put in place by your ISP.

When I say I'm getting 11mbs I really do mean 11mbs from a live server streaming a unique file, so this should be 100% accurate. And I'm also getting (nearly) triple the speed I'm supposed to be getting according to my package.

[RandomSand]

test results are fake. it shows triple my actual speed.

Or maybe 3BB got better speeds too ?

[Pib]

Yea, bogus results to international sites. Notice the Data Backup speed tester is an "OOKLA" tester (I.e., Flash-based tester). Flash-based testers are easily fooled due to in-country/local cache servers....the file you think you are downloading from that US/EU server is really being downloaded from a local cache server and the Flash-based speed tester don't know the difference. Yes, yes, you are indeed getting excellent speed to that in-Thailand server, but it not really testing real time to the Farang Land sever. Don't get me wrong local/in country cache servers are great for speeding up a network if the content you are after happens to be cached on that server.

Use a Java-based tester like testmy.net or the Java-based tester at dslreport.com. Java-based testers are much harder to fool...much less likely to get faster-than-light ping times and download speeds like that San Francisco, London, etc., server is just across the soi (probably where the local cache server is).

[RandomSand]

Yeah maybe those flash results are bogus.

The speeds using Java based tests are not as fast; but still decent.

Servers: Dallas, Alternate CDN Push Route, Amsterdam.

note: using large download test size to get average speed over long distance test.

Edited February 16, 2013 by RandomSand

[Pib]

Yes, those of very good real word download speeds...very similar speeds to what I got on my previous True DOCSIS 20Mb/2Mb or my current True DOCSIS 14Mb/1.4Mb plan. Yeap, Flash/OOKLA testers are notoriuosly inaccurate...but they usually give a person results that make him smile...then he wonders why his downloads, live streaming, browsing, etc., seems slow with such good speedtest results.....well, it could be because the Flash/OOKLA speed tester gave bogus results and the real world results (like you usually get with Java-based testers) are not as pleasing...the truth may hurt a little. I'm not sure I can remember any ISP (Thai or not) that used a Java-based speed tester on their ISP support websites...I guess Flash-based testers keep many customer happier (fooled) for international speed testing.

Regarding the international speed I guess Thai ISPs apparently limited their international bandwidth (bandwidtch costs money) or they just don't have enought international bandwidth....no problem with in-Thailand bandwidth and maybe to locations like Singapore....just not enough bandwidth being given/being bought when using those undersea/overland fiber optics cables. And I guess since the great majority of their customers are Thai that in-Thailand Thai web sites are predominately what they visit so having a lot of international bandwidth is really not needed by the majority of their customers so what spend money on it...just cut into profits.....just guessing.