Shortcomings of broadband internet service in Taiwan

Life Technology
1

A report by the head of the National Communications Commission (NCC) under questioning by lawmakers yesterday has highlighted how poorly Taiwan is performing, compared with other countries at similar stages of development, in providing broadband service to the general public.

The NCC is making ambitious plans to improve that situation, particularly by opening “last mile” infrastructure to private operators. A Chinese report says that, as part of that plan, Chunghwa will be required to lease last-mile infrastructure to private service providers “at cost plus a reasonable profit.” But it remains to be seen how fast and far they’ll be able to progress with those plans, and how soon it will be before we can enjoy a similar level of broadband service to people in countries like South Korea and Singapore.

Here’s the story about it in today’s Taipei Times.
Here’s a more detailed report in Chinese.

Key points:
The average broadband speed in OECD countries is 37.5 Mbps. In Taiwan it’s only 13 Mbps.
For this “turtle-paced” service, consumers in Taiwan pay higher charges than consumers in other countries (as one lawmaker asserted).
South Korea launched 100 Mbps service in 2008, and will start providing 1 Gbps service this year.
In Singapore, 95% of buildings can offer fiber-optic connection to the home, and the country will launch 1 Gbps service next year.
Even Malaysia is ahead of Taiwan in broadband internet service delivery.

How do you all feel about this situation? Are you satisfied with what you’re getting for your money from your service provider, or do you think that Taiwan, “the island of technology” in a government slogan of the recent past, should be doing a whole lot better.

And before the fellow posting as “Teacher Lin” pipes in, let me save him the trouble by saying it for him: Taiwan’s broadband infrastructure is already superb, at least as good as it is in America and those other countries where they look down on Asians as lesser beings. Foreigners ought to be glad that they’re even allowed to use Taiwan’s broadband facilities and services to go online, and should keep their mouths shut about their biased and uninformed perceptions of a country where they don’t belong and where they have no business to be criticizing how anything’s done or not done.

2

Basically it doesn’t matter what speed you get at your home because the big hurdle is the server and connection were you download from abroad … CHT has bad connections and speeds to other countries …

3

Personally I love my broadband. I live in an older neighborhood with few large buildings and people too cheap to upgrade past the standard package while I got the best my wife can find. I can download, play an MMO, surf the net and watch youtube videos all at the same time. I pay a pittance compared to people in the US and I have no worries over anti-piracy measures like they have in South Korea or the US.*

High broadband speeds are great, but you have to have a use for them. I basically hit the upper limit of my computer before I hit it on my broadband, like when I play 2 MMO’s, watch hi-def youtube videos, surf the net, browse the Itunes store and download. My computer is nice and probably better than 95% of the ones Taiwanese use. I can barely see them having a use for that much broadband outside of downloading and watching youtube videos. This isn;t the US where you have multiple computers being used at once.

Now if you are in a heavily built up newer area, I can see you going to a crawl because of all the downloading, youtube videos and MMO playing. I have a coworker who will spend all night watching youtube videos. :loco:

4

Honestly, I have the 50M line and while its probably not the best compared to other country, heres a few things to keep in mind:

Hinet doesn’t care what you do with your connection, as long as you don’t do anything illegal like hacking bank computers, but even then its the law enforcement that gets you, hinet doesn’t care. I’ve heard stories of people getting threatening letters from law firms in Germany for using bittorrent or other p2p network, fat chance of that happening in Taiwan.

Also many ISP in other countries have stupid measures like traffic shaping which limits p2p… or even bandwidth limitations. I am only aware of Kbro doing this (and they often do this with cable because its shared across the community) but hinet won’t do anything like that. I get 1MB/sec and 300kb/sec upload on bittorrents… although that’s a limit I impose on my bittorrent client to prevent the network from being bogged down… if I remove all restrictions I think I can get a lot more than that.

Furthermore its hard to judge a network by its speed as it will differ significantly depending on where and how you surf. International surfing is always going to be slower than surfing domestic sites.

I think this thread belongs in the technology forum…

5

I work in the broadband “last-mile” industry, and Taiwanese lawmakers are having a laugh if they even think of putting Taiwan in the same bracket as Singapore and South Korea. Not even close. The major metros in India and Brazil are now closing in on Taiwan fast, and India’s 4G wireless rollout will happen five years ahead of Taiwan’s (if a recent post quoting 2017 for Taiwan is accurate). The creaking, arrogant monopoly of Chunghwa Telecom is a big problem, but opening up the last mile to competition only pushes the problem further back up the network. The last mile ISPs will still have to buy their bandwidth from CHT, and the UK is a great example of how that doesn’t really work in reducing prices and increasing speeds to a level comparable with the frontrunners in the world.

However, and it is a big “however”, Okami has a very valid point about the use that most people get out of their bandwidth. I have 50 Mbps at home, and it’s great for a few narrow tasks, but for the most part the difference between 10 Mbps and 50 Mbps has been a lot less noticeable for me than when I switched from 4 Mbps to 10 Mbps. It’s lovely having a 1 Gbps rollout in Korea, but as a home user, what are you going to need 1 Gbps for? You can stream HD (1080P) video with around 5–8 Mbps (depending on the compression algorithm), and the key for playing online games is not bandwidth, for the most part, but latency. Even if we envision an upgrade to some kind of “Super HD” (say 2160P), you’d only need 32 Mbps to stream it. Now if you’re talking about business connectivity it’s a different kettle of fish, of course.

I think traffic shaping is a perfectly legitimate thing for ISPs to do. Do you want your Skype call to fail because the guy next-door is downloading seventeen seasons of Xena? I can assure you that Hinet shapes traffic too for home users, but they do it in a reasonable manner that most users don’t even notice.

6

I’d like to know more about this: my internet speeds seem to be all over the place, and I’d like to know what slows the connection down. Downloading can be really fast, but the initial connection to a website can sometimes take a long time: what causes this? How does using a proxy server increase or decrease connection speeds?

As an example, I use Witopia (with a proxy in Vancouver) to watch CBC Hockey Night in Canada, usually on Sunday mornings. Last week, this was smooth and great; a couple of days ago, it was unwatchable, with 10 second hangs every 10 seconds or so. What would lead to this kind of difference? Would the problem be in my building, within Taiwan, or somewhere else entirely?

Note that the streaming speed for CBC is much lower than the download speeds I get at other times, which suggests the problem isn’t the “flow down the pipe”, or whatever tech term I should use. I can potentially get far higher speed - but for some reason, at some times I don’t get it, especially when streaming. (Whether or not I’m using a proxy.)

EDIT: I see Taffy’s posted on this too, and mentioned latency: this is a term I’m vaguely aware of, but I’ve never been too sure what it means, or if there’s any way to improve it.

7

I guess it also has to do with how many connections the server receives, if many connect at the same time it stresses the server … routers have limitations too. Same goes for the Taiwan side connections … on rainy days there will be slower connections as many people stay home and use high bandwidth applications.

8

Lived in Taiwan for 7 years and thought the broadband was great, but then I moved to South Korea and now I truly know what broadband feels like. Download 2GB torrents within minutes…not freakin’ hours/days like in Taiwan. Taiwan better shape up, cause it’s falling behind.

9

Latency is basically a measure of how long it takes your computer to get a response from the remote server (i.e. wherever you’re getting your data from). Bandwidth is how much data per second the server can shovel your way once the connection is established. Low latency and high bandwidth are the ideals. If you’re a gamer, low latency is crucial, because otherwise your character will be slow to respond to your commands, and if you’re slow, the terrorists/evil mages win. If your primary demand is streaming video, you’re not going to be too worried about latency as long as it doesn’t get ridiculously high. You won’t notice an extra half a second for your video to start (if the latency is high) - what’s important is that the bandwidth is high enough to stream the content without stopping every 10 seconds to buffer.

Another issue is oversubscription. ISPs won’t tell you directly about this, but all of them do it. What this means is that no ISP can offer the maximum advertised speed to all of their users simultaneously (this would be a 1:1 ratio). Most ISPs that I’ve done business with operate at somewhere between a 1:5 and 1:20 ratio for home users, though some apparently go even higher. They get away with this most of the time, because not everyone is using the maximum bandwidth all the time. But say the ISP has a router that can handle 40 Gbps, and it has 4,000 users connected to it (to make the maths both fairly realistic and simple). Each user might pay for 50 Mbps, but obviously if everyone used that at once it would overwhelm the router. So they ration at times of heavy usage - your Skype calls should remain unaffected (unless the ISP is really incompetent) but your download times for other things will suffer.

So, lostinasia, there could be a number of causes for your game breaking up every 10 seconds. Could be that usage on your local network is heavy. Could be that the pipe out of Taiwan is oversubscribed as you’re watching—Taiwan only has a certain amount of bandwidth available on international connections at any one time. Could be that the server in Canada is overstressed. Talk to your ISP and explain the situation. They may be able to help.

10

I know the complaints and think it is BS. Taiwan has excellent Internet connectivity. Sure, can’t compete or compare against S.K or Japan? So what! I have never had any problems once I started using Chung Hwa, and the only problems I did have in the past were because I was using some other private ISP company, which was utter shit. The broadband is probably one thing I will really miss when I leave.

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[quote=“Taffy”]However, and it is a big “however”, Okami has a very valid point about the use that most people get out of their bandwidth. I have 50 Mbps at home, and it’s great for a few narrow tasks, but for the most part the difference between 10 Mbps and 50 Mbps has been a lot less noticeable for me than when I switched from 4 Mbps to 10 Mbps. It’s lovely having a 1 Gbps rollout in Korea, but as a home user, what are you going to need 1 Gbps for? You can stream HD (1080P) video with around 5–8 Mbps (depending on the compression algorithm), and the key for playing online games is not bandwidth, for the most part, but latency. Even if we envision an upgrade to some kind of “Super HD” (say 2160P), you’d only need 32 Mbps to stream it. Now if you’re talking about business connectivity it’s a different kettle of fish, of course.[/quote]Yes, the jump from 4 to 10 is way greater than 10to 50Mbps. I would kill for US levels of latency, no really if you can get me down to 20-40 ping just point at the person you want whacked and it’ll be done.

One point I’d like to make is this isn’t nothing but normal Taiwanese govt tub-thumping. They don’t give a shit about this and nothing will be done. Most Taiwanese can barely use the internet. Even more think it is something evil. They’ve seen enough news stories about internet cafes and useless kids addicted to it to know what’s really going on. :whistle: My FiL has had everything favorited for him on his netbook by my wife. My MiL tried to get his WiFi cancelled and refuses to have anything to do with it. My guess is Zhonghua Telecom is just being shaken down by some legislators for jobs and cash for some of their family and supporters.

I’ve seen and used enough computers in Taiwan to have a pretty firm and broad anecdotal knowledge of it. After you update, uninstall, add proper programs and then have to deal with the shoestring budget most have been built on, you might have a machine you can use for more than Microsoft word much less surfing the net. :unamused:

12

Let me make you all feel better.

I pay US$100 a month for 2 Mbps in the UAE.

:frowning:

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So THAT explains my slow porn download… :ponder: :ohreally:

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So THAT explains my slow porn download… :ponder: :ohreally:[/quote]

No, that’s the Republican presidential candidates setting up a “Great Porn Wall” …

15

Okami & Omni -

[b]

  • 1
    [/b]

I had a T-1 line in the U.S.A and the line I have here, in an older lane house with several student apt buildings right next to me rocks !
My Dl is very quick. Fast enough for my needs. And when I travel, I can find a Wifi hot spot with no trouble.

Could it be better?..Yeah…but so what?

reminds me of the old expression…“So…what do you want? Egg in your beer?”

16

I’d like to know more about this: my internet speeds seem to be all over the place, and I’d like to know what slows the connection down. Downloading can be really fast, but the initial connection to a website can sometimes take a long time: what causes this? How does using a proxy server increase or decrease connection speeds?

As an example, I use Witopia (with a proxy in Vancouver) to watch CBC Hockey Night in Canada, usually on Sunday mornings. Last week, this was smooth and great; a couple of days ago, it was unwatchable, with 10 second hangs every 10 seconds or so. What would lead to this kind of difference? Would the problem be in my building, within Taiwan, or somewhere else entirely?

Note that the streaming speed for CBC is much lower than the download speeds I get at other times, which suggests the problem isn’t the “flow down the pipe”, or whatever tech term I should use. I can potentially get far higher speed - but for some reason, at some times I don’t get it, especially when streaming. (Whether or not I’m using a proxy.)

EDIT: I see Taffy’s posted on this too, and mentioned latency: this is a term I’m vaguely aware of, but I’ve never been too sure what it means, or if there’s any way to improve it.[/quote]

If you are using HINET, there used to be a huge difference in speed for the static versus dynamic IP connections.

When I did the speed test to a CA, USA server, for example, the static IP connection achieved speeds of up to 8Mbps while the dynamic IP connection gave me a reading of 3 or less Mbps.
I’ve been checking this all the time and for the past 6 month or so these two connection are almost the same.

Anyway, it still seems to make some difference.

Go tho the HINET website, log in with your account or create one and register your static IP. Every HINET user can have one.
To set up your INTERNET connection with the stable IP, just type (your accout)@ip.hinet.net instead of (your accout)@hinet.net

17

I’d like to know more about this: my internet speeds seem to be all over the place, and I’d like to know what slows the connection down. Downloading can be really fast, but the initial connection to a website can sometimes take a long time: what causes this? How does using a proxy server increase or decrease connection speeds?

As an example, I use Witopia (with a proxy in Vancouver) to watch CBC Hockey Night in Canada, usually on Sunday mornings. Last week, this was smooth and great; a couple of days ago, it was unwatchable, with 10 second hangs every 10 seconds or so. What would lead to this kind of difference? Would the problem be in my building, within Taiwan, or somewhere else entirely?

Note that the streaming speed for CBC is much lower than the download speeds I get at other times, which suggests the problem isn’t the “flow down the pipe”, or whatever tech term I should use. I can potentially get far higher speed - but for some reason, at some times I don’t get it, especially when streaming. (Whether or not I’m using a proxy.)

EDIT: I see Taffy’s posted on this too, and mentioned latency: this is a term I’m vaguely aware of, but I’ve never been too sure what it means, or if there’s any way to improve it.[/quote]

If you are using HINET, there used to be a huge difference in speed for the static versus dynamic IP connections.

When I did the speed test to a CA, USA server, for example, the static IP connection achieved speeds of up to 8Mbps while the dynamic IP connection gave me a reading of 3 or less Mbps.
I’ve been checking this all the time and for the past 6 month or so these two connection are almost the same.

Anyway, it still seems to make some difference.

Go tho the HINET website, log in with your account or create one and register your static IP. Every HINET user can have one.
To set up your INTERNET connection with the stable IP, just type (your accout)@ip.hinet.net instead of (your accout)@hinet.net[/quote]

Should be the same speed because nothing changed. Whether the IP address given you by CHT is “dynamic” or “fixed” is irrelevant. Don’t confuse a fixed IP address with a dedicated IP address. Your “fixed” IP address is not the actual IP address a remote server will see.

18

My fiber is great but it cuts out all. the. time. I call customer service to get 不好意思d over and over until they tell me there’s nothing they can do. Worst part is that literally the next day I will get a phone call from a sales team asking me if I want to increase my speed up to 50M. Then they tell me the only way to increase my connection speed is to sign a new 2 year contract. :fume: All in all, my connection is superb, when it works. It will usually shit out at least twice a day while I’m using it, so who knows how many times it actually goes out when I’m not home? I know it’s the connection because the MOD goes out too.

I was just teamviewer-ing my dad’s computer to help him with something and his download hit 3.6MBps on Cox Cable in the Northeast US. Over-exceeded his connection. While on Skype. While I was remote accessing his computer. His 24mbps internet is US$40 a month. I didn’t believe it was that fast, but apparently Cox has some kind of “Power Boost” feature on the connections. It must mean they got in trouble for overrating their connections and scaled back their marketing a little. When demand is low, the speed can increase? My CHT is 12mbps for around NT$1k a month if I’m not mistaken. Seems that TW with its general focus on technology growth should have better, more affordable internet.

WHY IS MY TAIWAN MOBILE INTERNET SO TERRIBLE? What I find funny is that when I was roaming in Xiamen using Unicom (the crappy Mainland phone company) a few months ago I was able to watch the same web shows I watch here with absolutely no lag or buffering, while I was in a moving bus. Anytime I cross a bridge here my connection without fail cuts out while listening to internet radio, or just cuts out for no reason at all while my phone searches for service.

That being said, the fiber here is FAR BETTER than the garbage ADSL I had before. Usenet downloading maxes out the connection. However, CHT needs to improve its connections overseas as it is apparently the sole backbone here. Seems the only thing that loads quickly is yahoo.com.tw and P2P stuff like PPS. Anything hosted in Europe or Mainland China is ssssssllllloooowwwwwww.

I remember reading something a while back that said HiNET is the largest source of spam in the whole world.

19

Yep Hinet sucks, I think you should all cancel your accounts and get KBRO or other providers like seednet or sparq.

All my broadband is dedicated for uploading

speedtest.net/result/1844730206.png
speedtest.net/result/1844733425.png
speedtest.net/result/1844927448.png

It’s really slow in Taiwan too

speedtest.net/result/1848576502.png

20

[quote=“Satellite TV”]Yep Hinet sucks, I think you should all cancel your accounts and get KBRO or other providers like seednet or sparq.

All my broadband is dedicated for uploading

speedtest.net/result/1844730206.png
speedtest.net/result/1844733425.png
speedtest.net/result/1844927448.png

It’s really slow in Taiwan too

speedtest.net/result/1848576502.png[/quote]

I hear ya. Those re-sellers are known to work some real magic re-branding the crappy connection CHT supplies them. Value-added, indeed.