Reasons for slow download speeds in the Philippines and don't believe what Speedtest says

[bang4dabuck]

I was trying to understand why my net seemed slow compared to what my Speedtest said it was. I know the problem was placed on the shoulders of PLDT, from what I understand it was their refusal to connect to the INTERNATIONAL BACKBONE in an attempt to penny pinch. I read somewhere that even as the perspective backbone supplier Pacnet submitted their price that PLDT try to turn the table and insist that they should be the one being compensated, think of the tons of users that Pacnet could expose to advertising, LOL. Any net savvy people know that this is still the problem ?

I don't believe my Speedtest results because I feel they try to mislead you by running the test to a server that is less than 10 miles away and since most of the sites I access are in the US. Also they drop the lowest 30% portion of the results but only 10% of the highest. They are really an agent of your ISP (PLDT, Globe) and makes it look faster than it really is.

The test I think is skewed more towards reality but is a real downer

http://testmy.net/download     ***      THIS IS NOT A DOWNLOAD BUT IS SHORT FOR DOWNLOAD TEST ***

I do a MULTISELECT and chose all the available servers in the US. My results are good to very good ... for the Philippines but suck compared to most everywhere else. Ratings are at the bottom of the results.

So now I figure is there a way to see where the hold up is along the route ? I found a test that would provide that for me.

https://centralops.net/co/           On the left side there is a list of different tests available. You want TRACEROUTE.

The test sends packets of data to your device from a chosen server and shows the time involved in processing at each station/server along the way. I chose to have a server in central Texas send the data. My results show zeroes until I got in the region where it jumped to 30 at two servers and then when it hit PLDT it jumped again to 170 at all 3 servers before my device.

It's obvious to me that PLDT is the monkey wrench and I guess it's their work around backbone. A few years ago San Miguel was planning of becoming an ISP in partnership with the company that own Pacnet but for some undisclosed reason it fell thru, probably the usual Filipino greed thingy.

 

[earthdome]

Yes, speed test is best used for determining the speed of your connection to your ISP. Your speed to random websites on the world wide web depend on what the slowest point is on the network route from you to that website. For the Philippines that bottleneck will usually be the international cable from the Philippines to some other point in asia.