Broadband Jitters

Been noticing the past few days that our PLDT DSL connection has gone flaky. Well, I guess it's just the way it is. When you complain, they give you the whole tirade the advertised speed is "up to" and not a guaranteed, consistent speed like it is with big corporates. True. But things should get better for consumers too, right?

Curious about the actual numbers, I tried different sites to kind of gauge how slow  my connection was. Speed tests on the web are actually not that accurate in my experience. ISP's now allow super speedy bandwidth on short bursts, optimized of small packs of data. Speed tests usually send and receive small amounts of data. Those short bursts of speed help them perform better in speed tests. Some people call it a tweak, others term it as a cheat. However you prefer to call it, it still doesn't give you, the consumer, an accurate assessment. What's better? Right now I'd say ping tests.

Here're the results of a ping tests I did using Pingtest.net. I used different volunteered servers from different ISP's for comparison's sake. Notice how fast it is when it's pinging PLDT servers and how atrocious the packet loss was when it crossed ISP's...

Sky Broadband:






Globe Enterprise:






Bayantel:






PLDT: