Anything beyond the first hop of their upstream provider is “technically” not within the local ISPs’ control. Thus benchmarks are literally benchmark against SLA agreement of these upstream providers (uptime and latency) only.

The practice of over-subscription of these international bandwidth is normal to ensure profit. Over-subscription rates for consumers and commercial users are not made known and I believe not enforced by IDA.

Some of these numbers, presented in very positive and pretty numbers by ISPs and IDA matters little in real life experience when actual congestion sets in. ISPs are profit driven first, acceptable performance second for commercial users. Therefore if one expect consumer speed to match those seen in Japan or Korea, IDA has to regulate with layer 7 (application) benchmark, such as the download speed of a websites via HTTP or Flash video playback via Youtube, not single small ICMP ping packet for latency.

@jmarr: interesting point. that just means IDA needs to update their benchmarks to represent what the average user here would use the Net for, e.g. YouTube, etc. they will have to set realistic or at least basic benchmarks for that.

Just a thought, FYI

To be fair, things have improved greatly – just try downloading a graphics card driver, an antivirus update and even watch an MSN video and you’ll get a pretty good ‘broadband’ experience. The reason: they are all cached locally, or have servers based out in Asia to serve audiences here.

But as pointed out, things can surely improve. YouTube, for some reason, doesn’t seem to be one of those applications located close enough to Singapore. And it’s true, some ISPs really oversubscribe the hell out of their pipes during peak hours.

Years ago, IDA did a regular bandwidth check on ISPs’ links with overseas sites in the US… I’m not sure what happened with that. I think that concept is workable. Sure, a $30-a-month line won’t come with QoS, but IDA can and should regularly check the “experience” of, say, watching YouTube or playing WoW on all the broadband services every quarter and post them online.

I too have a 10mb connection but cannot use youtube much of the time. Well I can, but only if I’m prepared to wait 30 minutes to buffer a 5 minute video.

Overselling is a common practice among ISPs but it either needs to be regulated or consumers need to complain more about it.

The small size of Singapore is both a curse and a blessing. The blessing is everyone can be connected with low latency and low cost. The curse is you only have a couple providers to choose from and they both oversell . We have a business line however and it does not seem affected.

I would be prepared to pay a slightly higher rate to ensure I get a minimum amount of bandwidth at peak times!

I wanna see you try getting anything close to 50% of the promised bandwidth on your peak hours.