Precious Netcom Pvt. Ltd. (PNPL) ISP Experience

I have been on PNPL for over two months now ever since my LCO moved me over from ANI Broadband and I just wanted to share my experience with them. I'm currently using PNPL as a backup for Tripleplay connection.

Installation/Pricing:

There was no separate installation because the same LCO provides both PNPL and ANI; so if you want my installation experience, you can check it out on my other thread ANI Broadband 100Mbit Plan experience | ANI Broadband

ANI had turned bad for me, with very low speeds and packet loss to international servers at peak times. Around mid-Feb , ANI went down completely for me and LCO wasn't able to fix it quickly (presumably because they didn't have SLA?), so they swapped me over to PNPL.

The funny thing is, before I got fiber installed at my home; the same LCO provided me with PNPL (1000/month for 100Mbit) and when I told him that international speeds were trash, he told me to switch to fiber and get ANI for 2000/month (100Mbit) . It worked quite well for me for around a year, until it too started screwing up.
Now, they want me to pay 2000/month for the same thing that I was paying 1000/month a year ago.

DNS Hijacking:

PNPL has DNS Hijacking just like most other small ISPs. This can be bypassed by using encrypted DNS (DoH or DoT); I'm currently using AdGuard Home for network wide encrypted CloudFlare/Google/OpenDNS.
If you host your own DNS Server or want to use a DNS Server without encryption this might be a problem for you.

No Public IP:

My LCO had told me that they will provide me static IP on PNPL for Rs. 500 Extra monthly but they never ended up giving me one (I didn't make any payment so it wasn't much of an issue). You'll get shitty CGNAT without any IPv6 instead. This isn't much of a problem for me as PNPL is only a backup ISP for me; but if want to use it as primary connection and you want public IP then PNPL isn't for you.

Speeds:

Like most ISPs, you will get full speeds to peered servers all the time, PNPL has been decent with non-peered speeds but the problem is it drops very low during weekends and peak hours.

Here are some speedtests at 2PM:

Servers: MNR Broadband (Delhi,peered), Singtel (SG), GTT.Net (London), Spectrum (NYC), AT&T (NYC).

It can drop really low during weekends (this test was done on 2nd Feb (Sunday) at 10PM:

Usually, it doesn't stoop this low (around 30-40Mbit on weekends).


Usenet speeds are 'fine' but its not reaching even close to full capacity (~12MB/s) with 60 connections and is quite spiky going between 7-10MB/s compared to flat 11-12MB/s on Tripleplay

Torrents are kinda hard to measure but I did try Ubuntu ISO, it was able to get beyond 100Mbit (around ~15MB/s) but the problem is it only got to this speed half way through the download (you can see the 7.7MB/s avg). It was initally quite slow at 4-5MB/s and this is a torrent with tons of seeders.

Also, good luck getting any upload on private trackers as PNPL doesn't have either IPv6 or any option for Public IP (paid or otherwise), so you are mostly closed off from the internet.

I also tried some test files such as Leaseweb files https://mirror.leaseweb.com/speedtest/10000mb.bin and DigitalOcean SG files SGP1 Speedtest | DigitalOcean .

With Leaseweb file on Firefox (no download manager) I was getting around ~3MB/s compared to ~9MB/s with Tripleplay (I let both download for 1 minute before checking).
With DigtialOcean SG file, I got ~16MB/s on PNPL and ~12MB/s on Tripleplay.

 

[JB701]

Routing/latency/packet loss:

PNPL uses TATA backbone for routing, in some cases (to certain servers) I find it has much lower latency compared to Airtel backbone used by Tripleplay which is one of the main reasons I'm keeping a TATA backbone ISP as secondary connection.

Here are some traceroutes (again, all the tests were done on wired Gigabit LAN):

Google DNS:

 Host                                                                                                                                                                                             Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
1. router.lan                                                                                                                                                                                     0.0%    34    0.3   0.2   0.2   0.3   0.0
2. 10.50.50.1                                                                                                                                                                                     0.0%    34    3.7   2.5   0.6   7.9   1.9
3. 103.99.196.29                                                                                                                                                                                 84.8%    33    5.8   3.1   2.0   5.8   1.6
4. as15169.del.extreme-ix.net                                                                                                                                                                     0.0%    33    1.9   7.0   1.4  50.2   9.2
5. 74.125.243.97                                                                                                                                                                                  0.0%    33    3.0   6.4   2.5  47.4   7.8
6. 172.253.67.97                                                                                                                                                                                  0.0%    33    4.1   4.6   2.2   9.9   2.3
7. dns.google                                                                                                                                                                                     0.0%    33    4.3   4.6   1.9  10.3   2.6

CloudFlare DNS:

 Host                                                                                                                                                                                             Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
1. router.lan                                                                                                                                                                                     0.0%    26    0.2   0.2   0.2   0.3   0.0
2. 10.50.50.1                                                                                                                                                                                     0.0%    25    1.3   1.5   0.6   3.5   0.8
3. 103.99.196.29                                                                                                                                                                                 96.0%    25    2.5   2.5   2.5   2.5   0.0
4. dhcp-192-192-9.in2cable.com                                                                                                                                                                    0.0%    25    0.8   1.4   0.8   3.2   0.5
5. 14.143.30.149.static-delhi.vsnl.net.in                                                                                                                                                         0.0%    25    2.5   2.2   1.4   7.7   1.2
6. ???
7. 115.114.85.222                                                                                                                                                                                95.8%    25   36.8  36.8  36.8  36.8   0.0
8. 115.114.85.241                                                                                                                                                                                 0.0%    25   39.7  39.8  38.6  42.3   1.0
9. if-ae-34-2.tcore1.svq-singapore.as6453.net                                                                                                                                                     0.0%    25   76.8  74.7  73.8  76.8   0.8
10. 120.29.215.101                                                                                                                                                                                 0.0%    25   79.2  80.6  78.4  98.8   4.4
11. one.one.one.one                                                                                                                                                                                0.0%    25   78.8  79.0  78.0  85.4   1.4

Pings and traceroutes are actually quite good, I had a few occasions during weekends where I got around ~2-3% packet loss but its been good recently.

Edit: I end up hitting character limit of forum with all the traceroutes , if you want me to do traceroutes to specific sites, you can reply.

Throttling:

I haven't noticed much throttling when I was testing PNPL out. I have tried some larger torrents and the speeds while takes time to max out does stay consistent when its hits the max.

Censorship:

One of the good things about ISPs (including PNPL) using TATA backbone is that atleast when I'm writing this, they don't block sites on https unlike Airtel or Jio backbone. If you access adult/piracy sites using http you'll be greeted with “Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India.” just like every other ISP but you can easily get around this by using an extension like https everywhere or simply by replacing http with https (provided the website supports https), no need for VPN or DPI Circumvention programs.

Support:

PNPL is completely provided through my LCO and as I said in ANI review they do fix internet down issues pretty quickly (I haven't had any downtime in over a month now).

Conclusion:

I defintley wouldn't recommend getting PNPL for Rs. 2000/month and I'll move to Excitel for backup ISP and if I can't convince the LCO to offer the same for 1000/month like I used to have from this month on, then I will likely swap over to Excitel's copper plans for backup internet as its way cheaper to pay long term.
If LCO does end up yielding and offering me 100Mbit for Rs.1000/month, then I will only swap over to Excitel when they start providing their '300Mbit' fiber in my neighbourhood.

It however might be worth getting for 1000/month for 100Mbit but PNPL isn't a special ISP by any means, if you have no other choice in your area then only go for it, it has DNS hijacking, doesn't offer static IP or IPv6 even with payment but the speeds aren't too bad (it gets to 50-60% speeds to international servers most of the time except for drops during weekends) and has no HTTPS site blocking as it uses TATA backbone.

 

[varkey]

So they don't have a standard pricing? I couldn't find a website either.

 

[kanurag94]

I will pick excitel or comway any day over PNPL mostly because of standard pricing and freedom to stop and start connection as I please (there are times when I don't need a secondary connection at all for months).
₹1000/month for 100mbit is high considering you have better options like 'Powernet (static ip, 820/100mbps on fiber and tata backbone) and 'Excitel'

 

[JB701]

@kanurag94 yeah definitely, I'm plan to switch over to Excitel once they have fiber in my area. I originally planned on getting Excitel ethernet plans but then I'll have to call them up and get all of it installed, I'll just wait till fiber is available.

@varkey Yeah, its only provided through various LCOs afaik, they had a website Suspended Domain but it got suspended lol, heres the archived link Precious Netcom

 

[vignesh_venkatesan]

PNPL doesn't peer with Google ?
It's very interesting to see an isp in India which is not peered with Google.

 

---

[JB701]

yeah, weirdly traffic goes through Extreme IX, speeds are still very good, not sure why they want Google stuff saturating their Extreme IX port when they can directly peer with Google.

 

[vignesh_venkatesan]

Tech Guy at my isp says that only Google,FB,Neftlix, Amazon,Akamai alone accounts for more 70% of thier traffic so they're peered with all of them to save cost.

 

[varkey]

yeah, weirdly traffic goes through Extreme IX, speeds are still very good, not sure why they want Google stuff saturating their Extreme IX port when they can directly peer with Google.

To peer directly with Google, you still need to go via an IX right? Google Edge Network

Only AMS IX, Extreme IX, Bharath IX and CIX Mumbai are the Google peering locations in India. So I guess it is cheaper to get one big fat pipe at Extreme IX rather than getting a dedicated pipe from Google at the same IX? Just a guess though.

 

[JB701]

Unsure, atleast on Tripleplay , as15169.del.extreme-ix.net never shows up on traceroute to 8.8.8.8 . Extreme IX ports looks pretty cheap though so I guess it makes sense ¯\(ツ)/¯

 Host                                                                                                             Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
1. AS???    _gateway                                                                                              0.0%    10    0.7   0.8   0.7   0.9   0.0
2. AS132453 dhcp.tripleplay.in                                                                                    0.0%    10    1.9  16.7   1.9  37.7  16.2
3. AS132453 wan-switch.static.tripleplay.in                                                                       0.0%    10    2.9   3.2   2.8   3.6   0.3
4. AS132453 core-router.static.tripleplay.in                                                                      0.0%    10    1.6   2.1   1.6   2.7   0.3
5. AS15169  74.125.118.188                                                                                        0.0%    10    2.9   2.9   2.6   3.3   0.2
6. AS15169  172.253.69.189                                                                                        0.0%    10    3.5   2.8   2.6   3.5   0.3
7. AS15169  209.85.252.65                                                                                         0.0%    10    3.2   3.8   3.2   5.4   0.6
8. AS15169  dns.google                                                                                            0.0%     9    2.6   2.8   2.5   3.1   0.2