tzlee.com/blog

Tag: SingNet

  • House Cleaning, Part One

    Sincere thanks to Hui Zhen, Ferren, Yan Po, Wen Xi, Chrispin and Sheng Xuan for helping clean the house. Every little bit counts!

    Unfortunately, I left my DSLR in the new house. I will get some photos and post them up tomorrow.

    Meanwhile, here’s what we accomplished today (Saturday).

    • Cleaned up the store room and moved the mess in the kitchen over.
    • Cleaned up all three bedrooms, kitchen, windows and grilles. Thanks ladies! Fantastic job.
    • Built the Ikea furnitures – a study table, two office chairs and a side table with drawers. Some instructions are wrong, especially the cheaper furnitures.
    • Installed the almighty lock that only requires one key for all! Whoopee. How I wish my car key could be used instead.
    • Set up the bed in the master bedroom.
    • Carpenter dropped by to inspect the work done on Friday.

    Here’s the agenda for tomorrow (Sunday).

    • Pass ah fen a hamster. 🙂
    • Grab the side table we ordered from Defu.
    • Pay the balance for the sofa and dining table and arrange for them to be delivered next week.
    • Grab the trolley, TV and sub woofers from parent’s office. I left my new TV there for storage.
    • Bak Kut Teh at Jurong East for lunch at 1300 hrs.
    • Clean the living room, and maybe three bedrooms if they get dusty again.
    • Figure out where to mount the bathroom accessories, and what else we need to buy.
    • Assemble the Ikea lamps.
    • Set up the home router. It’s going to a Linux box with Vyatta, then I can establish an IPsec Site-to-site VPN! Whoopee!
    • Hopefully a karanguni drops by so I can get rid of the old ceiling fans.

    I’m still thinking if I should start moving some old books and computer equipment. Maybe my R/C stuffs can go over too.

    The audio system will go over next week before the weekend, that’s for sure!

    More shopping list for next week.

    • A stool, just to facilitate cleaning some stuff that’s higher than us.
    • A (cheap) bicycle? Just to get to and fro the in-law’s place and Bukit Panjang Plaza.
    • A mini TV console for the master bedroom?
    • Another Ikea side table for the master bedroom?
    • Subscribe to StarHub TV and Internet! (Sorry SingNet, your marketing and helpdesk just fails me.)

  • Why FTTH Will Suck and 1 Mbps Symmetric Broadband is Enough for Everybody

    Watch this video. Although this video was made for entertainment, it does goes to show what people think 100 Mbps can give them.

    I think I need to start my rant. People have the wrong impression of subscribed broadband speeds. If everybody had 100 Mbps to their homes, we’ll be in for big trouble.

    As of 2007, Singapore’s broadband subscriber count is 796,500 – approximately 22% of our population. The population has grown from 3.7 million in 2007 to almost 5 million in 2009. If the percentage of subscribers remain, we’ll have approximately 1 million broadband subscribers to date.

    Multiply 1 million subscribers by 100 Mbps each, we need a whooping 100,000,000 Mbps total bandwidth to run broadband in Singapore. That’s 100 Tbit/s. Does such a bandwidth exist? No. The APCN 2 cable system has only 2.56 Tbit/s of capacity shared by the entire Asia Pacific.

    Think of the Internet as a highway. Data travels across the Internet like a car on a highway. Each car is loaded with goodies in the boot – YouTube, Windows Update, Facebook, BitTorrent. What happens if everybody drives a Boeing 747 on the highway? Sure, you can put more YouTube, Facebook and BitTorrent in a plane, but that plane’s not going anywhere because there’s simply not enough space on the highway for so many planes!

    Here’s another problem. Think of an auntie at NTUC with a years’ worth of groceries queuing up at the express cashier. Servers have limited capacity. Most network devices run either 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. There’s some adoption of 10 Gbps in ISPs, but it’s expensive and not commonplace in enterprises. If one person hogs the server with their all-so-awesome 100 Mbps broadband, you’ll just have to wait for your turn.

    1 Mbps (megabit per second) translates to approximately 125 KB/s (kilobyte per second). 1 byte contains 8 bits. I have a 8 Mbps StarHub broadband at home. Do I see 1000 KB/s downloads often? Nope. More like 60 KB/s; that’s barely 512 Kbps. So what makes people think 100 Mbps will make a difference?

    I’ve heard people ask complain why we aren’t enjoying 100 Mbps like Japan and Korea. They say Singapore’s broadband providers suck. Well, look guys. Japan and Korea rely highly on local content due to their language.

    On the other hand, Facebook and YouTube are the top two visited sites in Singapore. These sites aren’t local. In fact, blame it on the content providers here. They are the ones that suck.

    Korea has 14 million broadband subscribers as of December 2006. Do the math. They’ll be in a massive traffic jam if they had relied on international content.

    Humans are born selfish. Everybody wants a piece of the Internet. We need to start giving (uploading) instead of taking (downloading). Broadband has to be symmetric. Up-selling 100 Mbps asymmetric broadband will only make things worse. Just like Globalization, we are consuming more than we can produce. Mark my words.

    Further reading:

  • StarHub and SingNet Practices Traffic Management

    Slow Internet access tonight? ISPs say, blame it on the P2P.

    In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about how the Internet really works and why there’s really no such thing as dedicated Internet bandwidth. To tackle the increasing bandwidth usage, ISPs are now installing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to reduce bandwidth contention.

    StarHub has publicly announced its use of Sandvine Incorporated‘s Policy Traffic Switch to shape individual user’s traffic to allow fair use of network protocols for better user experience.

    StarHub has been working with our technology partners to mitigate the heavy burden caused by the volume of P2P traffic on the network. To ensure latency-sensitive applications (such as web-surfing and video-streaming) are not severely affected, especially during peak periods, we have implemented traffic shaping to optimize the overall efficiency of the network.

    SingNet also has a clause in fine prings, urm… prints, hidden deep beneath their website just like any other SingTel legal agreements:

    SingNet employs a fair use policy that ensures no single traffic protocol monopolizes all available bandwidth at the expense of other traffic protocols. Network management activities are carried out only for the P2P traffic protocol by ensuring that P2P traffic does not consume more than 10% to 25% of the total available bandwidth during peak and off peak hours respectively.

    So, what really is fair? Is it fair that I get less P2P bandwidth than my neighbor next door watching YouTube? Afterall, everybody uses the Internet differently.

    Quoted from Macbeth: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”