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PTCL’s wireless anywhere access is really cheap at an initial cost of Rs 8000 |
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009 |
The communication infrastructure in Pakistan, both wired and wireless, is quite incredible. There’s one pet pieve I’d had for a while though, and that’s the lack of inexpensive, true mobile broadband in Lahore. WiMAX is available, but I haven’t come across a USB dongle from Wateen so far. Their rates are also a bit on the higher side, with download caps and other nonsense. WiTribe and Mobilink are offering their services in Karachi only at this time. I’ve tried Telenor’s Edge USB dongle and PTCL’s WLL USB mobile. The former is too slow for full-fledged web surfing, video watching etc. and the latter – though a bit faster – is too clumsy. You end up having to plug-in a mobile WLL handset, a candybar phone, into your USB port. The thing hangs out and hampers mobility. I just don’t like it. And it delivers only about 20Kbps. Just not worth it.
So, imagine my surprise when I tried out PTCL’s new EV-DO service. I paid Rs. 8,000 for one-time connection and hardware purchase charges. I got a sleek looking, black EV-DO wireless USB dongle with an extensible antenna, that happens to go perfectly with my T60. The dongle has a built USB storage, so all I had to do was plug it in and the setup program started… from the dongle itself! Pretty cool. It took me about 5 minutes to run through the install, and boom! I was in business. My first stop was google.com, which loaded instantly. I could already see the difference in performance but I decided to measure it a little more objectively. Speedtest.net is always handy for that.
Speedtest detected that I was coming in from Lahore and using PTCL’s Triple Play network. It automatically selected Islamabad as the closest server site that I should run broadband tests against. But I wanted to be a little more adventurous – and realistic. I picked a few sites in the US since many of the websites I use are hosted there. That would be a true performance test, I thought to myself! And here’s some snapshots of the results I got.
Pretty insane! I’m getting 2.28Mbps downlink from Texas and 1.57Mbps from New York! I thought this was too good to be true so I reran the tests multiple times. The results were in the ballpark each time. Over the next couple of days I tried the tests at different hours of the day. No difference. These are real!
I did notice that the latency was somewhat higher than I would have liked, but unfortunately that is one of the issues with wireless systems like EV-DO. You pay a bit in the latency department for the bandwidth and mobility it gives you. Further study of the EV-DO spec does indicate that Rev 2 (or B?) optimizes latency somewhat. I am not sure whether PTCL has their transponders upgraded to this spec. It’s a software-only upgrade, so if they don’t already, I hope they do this soon.
The monthly charges for PTCL’s EV-DO service are a flat Rs. 2,000. Only $25! That’s half of what you pay Time Warner for fixed Roadrunner cable and about 1/4th of what you pay AT&T for an unlimited package on an AirCard. The value and performance are just amazing. |
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Source : http://techlahore.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/the-amazing-awesomeness-of-ptcls-ev-do-wireless-broadband/ |
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