Tuesday 6 December 2011

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At this moment in time, my building, Grandview Gardens is being serviced by two Internet/TV providers. The notorious i-Cable and the expat-friendly PCCW/Netvigator/Now TV. The limitations are as such:

Options iCable PCCW/NOW
Price Starts from 75 HKD/month Starts from 218 HKD
Bandwidth 10 MB*, 50 MB*, 110 MB* 8 MB
Contract 18 months 18 months
TV i-Cable TV - Has EPL Now TV - more expat friendly
Others Reputation for Bad customer service Horrible Now TV UI

The main difference between the two providers is that i-Cable can decouple their Internet from their TV offerings, whilst PCCW you have to get both. The other difference is, the bandwidth, this is not as simple as comparing apples to apples. PCCW offer a dedicated ADSL line to each customer. Whereas, i-Cable offers a fibre service to the building that is shared among all i-Cable users within the building. The draw card is that there is the "potential" for a larger bandwidth.


So heeding the warnings and opting for the higher bandwidth service I sign with i-Cable hoping that I will never have to deal with their customer service. For those who are interested, I signed for 50 MB line with Cable TV, initial Hong Kong server speedtest.net results are above. Online! Time to clear that backlog of blog posts.

Update:
  • London server: Ping 632 ms, Download - 1.30 Mbps, Upload - 0.42 Mbps
  • San Francisco server: Ping 174 ms, Download - 1.94 Mps, Upload - 3.58 Mbps
  • Seoul server: Ping 91 ms, Download - 2.54 Mbps, Upload - 7.68 Mbps
  • Sydney server: Ping 345 ms, Download - 1.34 Mpbs, Upload - 0.65 Mpbs

Connection can be intermittent - still undecided if I made the right decision going with iCable ...


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