Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

So it came to this. I ditched my cable for DSL, which in this case meant changing from MaxOnline to SingNet. Since I had a personal vendetta against Singnet, it was an ironic joke on me. It’s making me sheepish just thinking how strongly I had recommended MaxOnline just a few months ago.

The entire story traces its roots back till 2001, when I got my very first white-box (custom-built) PC at a very shocking price of $1,995. Back then, broadband in Singapore was still growing its teeth, and the country lined up for squealing 56k access. Through some kind of weird plan, SingTel (the main company of SingNet which maintains the PSTN network in Singapore), they offered free Internet access over the 56k modem lines. I only had to pay for the outstanding call charges while the Internet access was active.

It was really cool at that time, since my modem always managed to hit at least 50.6 kbps out of the practical maximum of 52 kbps. That happy relationship lasted until my family moved out of our old estate, and into our new house in 2003. There, the modem couldn’t hit beyond a transfer rate of 26.6kbps, which bugged me a whole lot. Usually, bad phone lines are blamed for a poor connection, but when a technician came down for diagnosis of the problem, he simply told us that “it was not possible to improve our connection, since it was built that way”. Then he proceeded to sell us the company’s broadband connection.

“Ok, then how would you guarantee that I can get 256 kbps with this broadband connection if your company phone lines cannot even manage a 56 kbps?” I asked.

“Don’t worry sir, broadband is digital (sic), confirm very fast one. Mine also like that, so I spend money to buy broadband”

“What about my phone line? Are you going to fix it? It states in your agreement that your company will guarantee at least 40.6 kbps connection.”

“Sorry, nothing we can do for your phone line”

That sounded a lot like a smoke bomb, but I didn’t have the money to get a broadband connection anyway. And since they didn’t even stick to their side of the agreement to fix the line, I swore to never use SingTel or SingNet’s services ever again.

So I hopped onto StarHub’s MaxOnline cable Internet when my block got hooked up to the cable television network. My, I was so awed by the speed that I thought files were being blown down that thick black coaxial cable! It was very fast in the hey-days of 2004 to early 2006. That’s despite the occasional annoyance, like having the undersea cable cut by ships with blind anchors, sharing the (then already meagre) bandwidth going to outside of Singapore. I could even get at least 700 kbps during Singapore’s peak Internet traffic hours.

Then, 6 months ago for some weird reason, the overseas Internet connection plunged to ridiculous levels:

Videos streamed like a trickle, security updates took all day to download, and everything was a general pain in the backside.

Yuck. I called Customer Care, which was really quick to blame the entire thing on the last-mile cable connection into my house. They called their own bluff when their technician came down, and proved that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my Internet connection.

Next, they blamed overseas servers for being stingy in serving up the bytes. Their excuse was shattered when I got my friends on other ISPs to conduct speed tests, achieving at least 1, 200 kbps! It was sickening to have technical support sit on everything for months and months without taking any action to improve their own overseas bandwidth, which was definitely getting very over-crowded.

So, out of absolute frustration, I signed up for SingNet’s ADSL plan (oh, the irony), and immediately got smooth video streaming, and a whole lot better experience than if I had stayed with StarHub:

Not exactly an astronomical difference in overseas speed, but at the very least, YouTube streams smoothly, and I didn’t have to wait all day to download all my security updates!

So I guess it’s goodbye to StarHub now. They had their chance, but they blew it. Just trawling along Hardwarezone, and listen to multiple complaints on the same issue. I’m glad that I escaped the now ludicrous service.

Here’s one more for comparison:

StarHub:

SingNet:

I’m absolutely gutted. Though on principle, SingNet is anal to cripple its own 56k service to promote its own broadband service, at the very least, the service does a decent job.

[tags]SingNet, StarHub, MaxOnline, ISPs, 56k, bandwidth[/tags]

Filed under: General