SingNet Offers? Find out more before clapping your hands!

I flipped the Saturday News papers and there it was, sprewed across a full page of the Saturday paper, Singnet offers 5mbps connection at $49.95!!!

One month ago, I went with Xiaoling to sign up for Singet Broadband access. It was not a very pleasant experience but I shall not elaborate about that today. I was enticed by their 'in-store' student package and signed up for a 3500kbps plan for $43 a mth. It was supposed to be a 2 year contract.

Why did I go for that? Well, altho Singnet was offering a 512 kbps plan for $29.95, I was weary of the slow and congested internet access that many of my friends had complained about, despite being 'broadband connected'. So I thought I might pay a bit more for a better speed.

By the way, kbps or mbps here, in very fine print, means kilobits per second, not kilobytes per second. one kilobyte is 8 bits, so a 512kbps connections means a 60 odd kBps connection only.

For your info, if you are having a singnet 512kbps connection, and you are sick and tired of waiting for your pages to load, you might want to check out singnet's 5,000kbps offer here here

But wait! it doesn't work that way.

I had 2 service guys from Singtel at my place these evening. They did some testing for 15 mins, told me that my connection's fine, everything's good and up to standards that singnet had promised. I thanked them for their time and shook their hands.

Here's some of their responses to my complaints

1) Slow sluggish MSN webcam with my sister who's in Ireland
- sorry you got to live with it. Ireland's just too far, and the msn server is not locally based, so the connection will be slow.

2) Slow downloading from websites such as youtube etc.
- sorry it could be a problem with the foreign site server, some sites are optimised for large number of surfers, so they restrict the speed that content will be sent from their server

3) Poor Internet broadband speed from various test websites (search broadband speed test on google)
- Sorry but are those sites reputable? Oh anyway those are overseas sites and no provider can garuntee overseas sites. By the way, let's go to the singnet website and check here. Oh the speed is very good ah.

So this is how it actually works. A 5mbps garuntees you 5 mbps access to local websites such as SingNet.com but no ones can garuntee that other websites will be faster.

So if let's say you are streaming a video from youtube or anywhere else, it could be streaming at 300 kbps, with a 512kbps connection. If you have a 5 Mbps connection, *abacadebraaaa*
you could be streaming at 300 kbps also! cos they say that its due to youtube's problem. Not their problem.

"if you have a 512 connection you will bottle neck at a max of 512 kbps if you open 2 youtube window, but with 5mpbs you can open 15 windows! "

cos "300 X 15 = 4500kbps"

Wow~

So you get enticed and pay more money for a 'faster' connection, let's just say that unless you have 10 siblings at home also connected to the net, and you need to share the 5 mbps with 10 siblings, a 5 mbps connection will just get you the same speed as a 512 kbps connection.

yeah, it came out of the Singnet Service guy. He himself also use only 1500 kbps connection.

"so if i upgrade to a faster plan, eg 10mbps, I will also be surfing at the same speed?"

"yeah, no point also" he shruggs his shoulders.

"haha, even if they offer 100 mbps next year, unless we have local websites that provide content at 100mbps, also no point" so said the other singnet guy.

So before you pple waste money signing up for a "faster connection", you all might want to think again.

Lastly, here's 2 good links.

1)A very funny starhub video.
Note that its website is not starhub.com. But I arrived here via the starhub page.

2)A good internet speed test site.