Thailand broadband speed survey: Up to?
Bangkok Post: 10 Feb 2011
Broadband speed trap stings usersConsumers in Thailand are baffled by internet service providers' use of ''up to'' in speed claims when defining the broadband connections people can expect to receive, a survey shows.
On average, customers can download at 71% of the advertised broadband speeds and upload at only 10%. The average speeds they pay for are four megabits per seconds (Mbps) for downloading and 512 kilobits per second for uploading.
The survey was carried out by the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Institute (TCI) under the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) and the Thai Webmaster Association.
Data gathered from January to December last year were based on a total of 5,286,196 tests by users of their connection speeds at the TCI-run website
www.speedtest.or.th.
Most of the testers reported that they subscribed to 4 Mbps download links (15%), followed by 3 Mbps (8%) and 6 Mbps (7%) and 2 Mbps (2%). Of note, up to 55% of the testers did not specify the speeds they paid for.
In the 4 Mbps range, 38% of True's broadband testers achieved the full downloading speed while 48% of them downloaded at more than 3.5 Mbps.
3BB testers got roughly the same results, with 48% of its testing users connecting at 3.5 Mbps or more on average.
By comparison, the maximum average speed of TOT's 4 Mbps testers was only 3.5 Mbps, with only 15% of them achieving rates higher than that.
For upload speeds, most customers of the three broadband providers achieved only 512 Kbps regardless of their download speeds. The figure is expected to reach 1 Mbps this year.
Thailand ranked 60th in global download and upload speeds, with an average 5.91 Mbps and 1.39 Mbps, respectively.
Testing connection speeds in Thailand:
www.speedtest.or.th- World Results:
www.speedtest.net/global.php#0 http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/telecom/220773/broadband-speed-trap-stings-users