C&W Speed Test
Sep 5th, 2008 by Don Ray
My current speed at 7:55 this morning. Maybe I should check it for a few days. My bill is for 768kpbs in the download side. This is what I remember from yesterday as well. I think I am supposed to get 128 on the upload side.
If you use C&W and want to test your speed, go HERE.
Hi Don Ray
Have you read the fine print? They all say “up to.” 638 is pretty good.
No, I only read my bill which said 768.. However when it gets down to 10-20, which is has done, fine print or not, it sucks.
I’ve been on CableOnda’s 1Meg service for over 2 years and 95% of the time I am getting close to 2Meg.
A good friend around the corner was on the same service, but never got better than 300K for over a year despite constant bitching. CableOnda blamed the problem on the state of wiring in his building (8-9 YO super-luxo Paitilla waterfront)
Eventually he got decent service but I’m not sure what cured his problems. However, for over a year CableOnda waived his monthly bills since they could not deliver minimally acceptable service. I doubt that they extend that courtesy to all users, though.. my friend’s wife is a native Spanish speaker and superb at dealing with corporate bureaucracy..
We run multiple TVs and two PCs on the one cable line and never have any problems except when the entire neighborhood is also affected. I have one cable modem that feeds into a D-Link switch and then hard-wired cabling in the apartment.
FWIW
Mike
I switched from C/W to Cableonda here in Boquete 3 months ago. Only one hour of lost service and everytime I check I get just above the 500K I signed up for. I never got the 256 I signed up for with C/W, usually around 210 and sometimes less.
Mike and Pantah thanks for leaving a comment. Nothing it perfect. Some things less so than others.
if you want to check your speed on cable onda click here
http://www.speedtest.net/
and click on panama city…
Hi Bob. Thanks. So I can test my speed even though I don’t have the service yet? Not too shabby. Just kidding!
Don Ray,
).
A useful utility I use in Linux is gkrellm. Although I don’t often get a total download speed of 3 Mbps as I’ve contracted for, I see >384 kbytes/sec (3 Mbps) a lot of times. Gkrellm should be available in the repositories for your distro (not sure whether you’re using Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or OpenSuSE
Hi tuxi. I will take a look at it. I am still on openSUSE on my primary PC. The backup may be on any distribution at any time. It usually canges once a week.
Cable Ondas internet service is excellent. However, they have their own game. After you sign your one year contract, they start interrupting service and ask you to pay for the whole year in advance. In my case I pay them the very day I receive the bill via email. But it appears that this doesn’t make them happy. They want you to pay for the entire year and they cut the service where you can only receive a notice in Spanish demanding the full years worth. Then when you call their office and press #1 for an english technician you will be disconnected every time. In my case I relented and spoke to a Spanish speaking person. He said he knew no English but he sure understood M&*^%$ F*&$#@ in English.
You actually get 768, but thats the entire bandwidth including overhead which can vary from 5-20%. Depending where you live and how good your PC is, you can make it a little better by tweaking your TCP settings. Try the dsl forums tweak test to see some reccoemnded settings.
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks
Also makesure you close any / all applications in the background and try with different broswers as they all give slightly different performance.
Cable onda actually over provision their bandwidth using the modem as a limiter so is affected less (that’s why some people hack their modem to get more bandwidth, but this screws the neighbours connections as you are robbing the shared bandwidth from everyone.)
Hi Russ. Thanks for dropping in. Since you seem to be in the know for Panama Internet providers, what is the real scoop on capping download amounts by either Cable Onda or C&W.
CW Does what it says on the tin.. CableOnda do what they want…