Packet Loss and Slow Speed Problems on Airtel Broadband

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I've heard very little about them... they can't be too awful, but only a user of theirs could say if the ping rates are anything like the aforementioned leased line - anyone?

From what I've seen even the leased line isn't anything great. Even when I go in early and I'm sure I'm the only one using the network, connection quality is mediocre. Ping rates are highly unstable. The single digit values can fluctuate up to 80ms and the connection goes dead for a few seconds every 15-20 minutes. My terminal is on the same switch as the gateway, so I doubt there are other factors unless the gateway or CPE is crapping out. This one costs Rs.10000/Month for 1Mbps unlimited.

Will you be able to provide 40ms to Singapore anytime soon? What about to other ISPs in the same city? Airtel is notorious for 30ms in the first hop itself; or is that a problem with all ADSL lines?
 
From what I've seen even the leased line isn't anything great. Even when I go in early and I'm sure I'm the only one using the network, connection quality is mediocre. Ping rates are highly unstable. The single digit values can fluctuate up to 80ms and the connection goes dead for a few seconds every 15-20 minutes. My terminal is on the same switch as the gateway, so I doubt there are other factors unless the gateway or CPE is crapping out. This one costs Rs.10000/Month for 1Mbps unlimited.


Sad to hear, and I imagine highly annoying. Rs10k/month is quite reasonable for 1Mbit/s leased line IMO... it's unlikely to be uncontended 1:1... might be... they'd make a profit... but I guess that depends on their margins... It's way below MTNL's leased-line tariffs.

It appears they have Fibre or at least Hybrid Fiber, but there may also be some RF (Radio/Wireless) mixed in. Any idea how yours is delivered?

Will you be able to provide 40ms to Singapore anytime soon? What about to other ISPs in the same city?


I dunno about 40ms but we average about 62ms as far as I know at the moment. Last I checked, we got about 4-5ms within Mumbai to another ISP, but I'd hazard to guess that the result would depend more on the other ISP than us. When I'm back in India I can check again.

Airtel is notorious for 30ms in the first hop itself; or is that a problem with all ADSL lines?

ADSL is weird, but 30ms is a bit much. I've never had an ADSL line which I've noticed this problem... at least not in recent memory. Could check against an MTNL or BSNL ADSL user.
 
It appears they have Fibre or at least Hybrid Fiber, but there may also be some RF (Radio/Wireless) mixed in. Any idea how yours is delivered?

I don't know what they are using but I assume its solid medium because of the latency. In college they had an RF leased line from Airtel and latencies were 200ms within the city. That cost them around Rs.150,000 for 3 months at 1Mbps.

I dunno about 40ms but we average about 62ms as far as I know at the moment. Last I checked, we got about 4-5ms within Mumbai to another ISP, but I'd hazard to guess that the result would depend more on the other ISP than us. When I'm back in India I can check again.

I have been getting 60ms to Singapore for years on Airtel, and this is including the 25-30ms first hop latency. Which means they are actually getting 35-40ms to Singapore.
 
I don't know what they are using but I assume its solid medium because of the latency. In college they had an RF leased line from Airtel and latencies were 200ms within the city. That cost them around Rs.150,000 for 3 months at 1Mbps.


Ouch. But then again, if that was more than 4 years ago, prices have come down quite a lot since then - the ceiling price for a 155mbit/s line at wholesale came down from something close to 10Cr /year to about 1.8Cr /year in 2006.

I have been getting 60ms to Singapore for years on Airtel, and this is including the 25-30ms first hop latency. Which means they are actually getting 35-40ms to Singapore.

Very little we can do about the laws of physics. I don't know what our ping times to SG would be like from Delhi or Chennai, the times quoted are for Mumbai only - perhaps they would also be around 45ms.
 
Ouch. But then again, if that was more than 4 years ago, prices have come down quite a lot since then - the ceiling price for a 155mbit/s line at wholesale came down from something close to 10Cr /year to about 1.8Cr /year in 2006.
This was around 3 years go.

Very little we can do about the laws of physics. I don't know what our ping times to SG would be like from Delhi or Chennai, the times quoted are for Mumbai only - perhaps they would also be around 45ms.
But once your network is national, wouldn't DelhiSingapore travel to the Chennai landing point through your internal network before reaching a public network? What kind of latency would we see between cross country Hayai IPs?
 

But once your network is national, wouldn't DelhiSingapore travel to the Chennai landing point through your internal network before reaching a public network? What kind of latency would we see between cross country Hayai IPs?

Anywhere in India to Singapore already pretty much travels that way, if not straight across the spine of India (over land), then going around the southern coast, back up to Chennai and then off to the east.

How long is a piece of string? It's hard to say - I'd reasonably expect we'd see fairly decent pings anywhere in India - between 10 and 30ms to any India-located servers, and to other users depending on their ISP. From memory I think we got 12ms to Speedtest.net Chennai server.
 
I meant would it travel entirely through your own private national network and thus give better latencies within the country within the Hayai Zone, and thus lower latencies to Singapore from any where in India than other ISPs can provide. Assuming your Chennai network would be directly connected to or very close to the landing point. Other ISPs have terrible latencies within India itself.Which also implies that you have to expand downwards and Chennai is going to be almost last on your list.
 
I meant would it travel entirely through your own private national network and thus give better latencies within the country within the Hayai Zone, and thus lower latencies to Singapore from any where in India than other ISPs can provide. Assuming your Chennai network would be directly connected to or very close to the landing point. Other ISPs have terrible latencies within India itself.

Which also implies that you have to expand downwards and Chennai is going to be almost last on your list.

That depends on what sort of inter-city links we end up using. As for Chennai being last on the list... eh? It's a major centre, it's in the top 5.

As I previously mentioned, now we can get in the vicinity of 12ms from Mumbai to another ISP in Chennai and I don't forsee this changing too much.
 

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