Thursday, July 22, 2010

UniFi Speed Tests

Having been using TM’s UniFi high-speed broadband service for slightly over two weeks now, I’m quite pleased with the service. It’s been surprisingly stable for me.

Internet Speed Test Results

I’m currently on the VIP5 package (over FTTH) i.e. 5Mbps download and upload. In my previous post, I had written about my UniFi installation experience.

Here are the speed test results from Speedtest.net:

 

 

As you can see from the above, download speeds were generally within the package speed limit.

I believe some of the upload figures from Speedtest.net were slightly inflated.

It appeared that there was some kind of speed throttling going on here as I saw the upload speed meter going down in sudden decrements at certain intervals as the upload test progressed. Had the upload test been longer, I would think it would have stabilized at around 5Mbps.

I have seen various speed meter movement behaviors over the past two weeks which lead me to think that TM was probably experimenting with various traffic flow or routing configurations?

In fact, in the initial days after I got my UniFi service deployed, I had seen insane speeds from Speedtest.net — even up to 50Mbps; but that has changed in the recent days.

Note that for some servers around the world, I got lousy speeds and slow ping times (see below).

My guess: This could be caused by a slow server or slow path to the server or both.

Ping Performance

Pinging to Google’s public DNS (8.8.8.8) averaged 4ms. I also got the same results pinging to a local web server.That’s pretty fast. On Streamyx, I normally get about 11ms.

Foreign server ping times were more or less the same, if not, just slightly better over ping times on Streamyx (typically >200ms for US servers). This is understandable since foreign traffic for both UniFi and Streamyx is probably routed over the same international backbones. The ping time advantage came mainly from the local side.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more UniFi reviews!

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15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats..

hatakeMahdi said...

Dear Jason, may i know is there any way to connect to unifi through preferred IP address & not using "obtain an IP address automatically"? Actually i'm using a network printer, so have to follow IP address given

Jason said...

@hatakeMahdi, have you tried assigning the network printer (using its hardware MAC address) to a fixed internal IP address in the router configuration?

Anonymous said...

Good Article

Anonymous said...

Good article. Thank you.

Ernie said...

Hello Jason. Thanks for writing a very interesting article about unifi.

I have a small favour to ask of you though, could you please conduct a speedtest towards the Norwegian server in Oslo and Forde?

This would be very usefull to me as I'm currently working toward the Norwegian market from Malaysia, but currently with stream x the person I talk to tend to hear himself as a echo on the phone.. I suspect this is due to a poor ping ratio..

Hope you are able to help me out=)


Ernie

Jason said...

Hello Ernie,

Here's what I got...

Oslo:
Download: 2.29Mb/s
Upload: 0.53Mb/s
Ping: 753ms

Forde:
Download: 4.87Mb/s
Upload: 4.82Mb/s
Ping: 316ms

Keenyuen said...

Hi Jason,
Why my VIP5 the download/upload speed never meet 5Mbps ???

Jason said...

Hi Keenyeun,

Did you get close to 5Mbps when using UniFi Speed Test?

http://www.unifi.my/unifi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75&Itemid=269

If not, there's clearly a problem with your link.

Otherwise, I suspect our international link is getting clogged up. I'm also not getting the speed I used to get with US servers.

David said...

Dear Jason,

I'm sorry but I think the 5 MBPS speed represented by Unifi is very misleading. No doubt we are getting good connection to the TM server, but in reality we are connecting to US servers.

There's a significant speed loss and lag when connecting to overseas server.

I'm constantly getting over 400ms ping with my game server to the US, so much so that I can't play the game, eventhough I get a cool 5MB speedtest to TM.

Jason said...

Yes David, I concur with you.

Gary said...

Jason,

how come your PING is so high? Mine only around 10 or lesser after so many try and my download speed is around 2.+ to 4+ only.

Thanks

Gary Liew

Jason said...

@Gary, I get around 10ms (or less) when pinging local servers. The higher ping times are for the case of overseas servers.

Chiek90 said...

hi i know this is an old post, but i just wanna ask something. im using the 5mbps unifi package. but do u know why i never get download speed near 5mbps? i usually get it around 1. smth. should i change the server or something? thanks. :)

Jason said...

@Chiek90, did you get close to the rated speed with the following local bandwidth test?

http://www.unifi.my/unifi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75&Itemid=269

If not, there's clearly a problem with your UniFi link. Note that download speed also depends on the location of the remote server and a few other factors.