Unifi by TM, a beginning to the end of Low Speed Broadband

It’s insane. The speed. The low ping time. The unlag of internet as we know it, formerly (and still is!) known as #streamysucks.

Welcome HSBB @ Unifi, TM’s latest fibre optic high speed broadband service. After hours of installation inclusive of 4 hardwares, FTTH cabling (Fibre to the Home) and setting up the wireless service, I proceeded to check

run some tests…

Of course, Unifi’s own speed test will show VERY impressive numbers. 1:1 ratio of download and upload rate, around 7-8mbps and with such a low latency ping figure, you can imagine the kind of speed when dealing with dl/ul from your webservers (local) and also for gaming (locally hosted of course). Streaming videos is going to be a cinch.

Upon several testing you can see the average download and upload are 8424kbps and 5598 kbps respectively (total of 8 test). More has been done to date but it doesn’t defer much, at least since the sign ups are still relatively low in this area (Bandar Utama, Petaling Jaya)

Most of the time, however, we can only trust the speed testers OUTSIDE of the ISP’s recommendation, hence the screenshot above using Speedtest.net. We all want to know how the speed from and to international servers fair, but let’s see if the local speed meets up to expectations first or not.

As you can see, it doesn’t defer much from Unifi’s own speed test system. around 7Mbps for upload and download and jusout 8ms ping time. Put in layman’s terms, that’s 5MB in 6 seconds (one song!), a video clip in 42 seconds (no lag in buffering!) and of course, a movie (you torrenting bastards! :P) in just about 16 minutes. Of course with DVD-rips, that would be just about an hour, imagine that!

Pingtest.net gave a very good rating. But do remember this is local. Then again, this is so much better compared to #Streamysucks or any of the Wireless Internet providers
(not their fault, can never achieve low ping rate on wireless)

So let’s try connecting to our New York server, where all your pr0n is based at (you know it!)

That’s averaging 2.5Mbps on an average day, I’d say it’s not too bad at all!
Youtube isn’t giving me any problems, even on High Definition. So far consistent also. Hopefully this will last!

Then I experimented on Pingtest.net again, this time with a server based in New York. The screenshot shows 1) how many packets are lost during a “transaction”, if there are forms of jitter, if any, and also ping measured.

Results? I don’t know, figure seems to high for me, especially if I were to play, say, Left 4 Dead in an international server. What say you?

Grade C: Your VoIP quality will suffer some, and you will have disadvantage in online games.

True enough, second part is confirmed. As for VoIP, Unifi from TM actually comes with a cordless phone which uses that technology, hence able to give us FREE nationwide calls and only 10 sen per minute for mobile numbers. Quality seems fine when I tested it, not really any different from Skype. But I guess it’s still awesome, because the hardware came free 😉

Oh did I mention it came with a PayTV decoder as well? Some of the free channels available include: Star Chinese, BBC, bernama,Australia network, euro news etc. Last I checked, it was working fine even in thunderstorm. Hehe. :p

The equipment above, all FoC. Probably cause we were one of the first customers (we got it less than a week after official launch by Prime Minister Najib) the team also came really quickly (unlike a certain service that TM also provides, nicknamed #Streamysucks) but what the heck, we had nothing to lose with the waiver of installation fees as well as 3 months free subscription. I guess they were really dying to make us their guinea pigs eh?

Then again, with the kind of download and upload speed I’ve been getting… who’s complaining? 😉