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Ok guys I am a bit of a computer illiterate. I signed up with DIC fo the 1MB internet acccess which people told me should be fast enough and good enough for most personal purposes including skype (which thanks to Fayz post I have managed to hoop up to again).

The problem is my connection at home is simply $hit, it takes a long time to access stuff (reminds me of the "dial-up" days), for example it takes 5-10 seconds (minimun) after I click the submit button on a new post before I can get back to the forum. Skype is hit and miss, mostly miss as the other person can not hear me although I usually can hear them perfectly.

I was wondering whether there is some kind of setting on my computer that I should check (don't know how) or whether DIC is not providing the right "speed" (how do I check?).

Thanks in advance. I know there are plenty of computer wizard on here.

1mb is what we have at our house, it seems to work fine. i would start by doing a bandwidth test to see what speeds you're actually getting.

Try a site like this:
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

hi

Try to log on a complaint at DIC and see what the engineers would tell you.....Where do you live exactly.....Emirates Hills
I remember telling my friend who lives at the Springs that the internet will always be slow in the weekend, that what the DIC tech people told him....

fayz wrote:1mb is what we have at our house, it seems to work fine. i would start by doing a bandwidth test to see what speeds you're actually getting.

Try a site like this:
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

That site is not always accurate when it comes to testing your bandwidth.....Alot of people access that site alot and it tends to be slow most of the time

Nokia middle east is a better way to test your connection. Try downloading a file from that site. Whatever rate your getting there

Download rate x 8 = (your bandwidth in Kilobits)

Bleakus wrote:hi

Try to log on a complaint at DIC and see what the engineers would tell you.....Where do you live exactly.....Emirates Hills
I remember telling my friend who lives at the Springs that the internet will always be slow in the weekend, that what the DIC tech people told him....

Thanks guys I'll try both suggestions later on tonight (hopefully it is idiot proof to follow up)

I live a block away from Fayz at the Marina and get my service thru DIC so it should work fine as well.

?

Concord, we have only 512 at our place in Emirates Hills and I am getting a faster connection than you are! Something definitely isn't right.

kanelli wrote:Concord, we have only 512 at our place in Emirates Hills and I am getting a faster connection than you are! Something definitely isn't right.

I just called DIC and they said to call them in the evenning when I am logged on. So I am hoping by Christmas the problem will be solved

Concord wrote:

kanelli wrote:Concord, we have only 512 at our place in Emirates Hills and I am getting a faster connection than you are! Something definitely isn't right.

I just called DIC and they said to call them in the evenning when I am logged on. So I am hoping by Christmas the problem will be solved

Why call them in the evening? Etisalat wouldnt ask you to do that why should they?

Hey Concs, did things work out for you in the end? Cusious because I had some Skype problems over the last couple days as well.

J.

The biggest problem I had when I was using your network a couple of months ago was not bandwidth, but the latencies in DNS lookups and the sheer number of routing hops between laptop and the servers I was using in the UK and US. Every time you check a new web address a DNS lookup is done to convert the www.domain.com name to an IP address, and the slow DNS lookups are usually down to DNS servers that can't handle the query load (I had lots of failed queries). The number of routing hops point to bad network design and a lack of peering. I dug around and found that the majority of the hops on my regular IP paths are local in the UAE. Think of routing hops as the maze which your IP packets have to take to reach their destination. The bigger the number of hops, the more torturous the route and the longer things take. The lack of peering is down to everything being funneled through Etisalat, so DIC can't create direct links (routes) to other Internet providers on the main regional internet backbones.

The problem is simple.. the DIC networks are oversubscribed. You have a 1MB connection (which isn't DSL) but this is ultimately contended (shared) between a number of people in a similar way to DSL networks. If you make a sustained download of a large file the speeds aren't so bad, but downloading lots of small files (e.g. reading web pages) exposes you more to contention. Unlike western ISP's i've not seen any contention ratios published for DIC or Etisalat's services and i'm guessing that's because they don't want you to know how high they are. In most of western europe 50:1 is normal for consumer services and 20:1 for business. I'm guessing they originally specced the DIC platforms for something similar, but the demand is so high that i'd guess the ratio's are much higher.

In the past, something i've found to make performance a little better on lossy connections is to wind the MTU value on the WAN connection down to 1400. I probably ought to offer my services here.. I still owe you a few beers. I've been journeying in the magic kingdom for a while but i'm back in Dubai again now..

SDB

on the traceroute, where did you see it have a latency? plus how much was the latency?
DIC will not tell you the convention ratio because they dont know it, they are having an issue where they are having alot of customers subscribing and not enough time to upgrade their bandwidths with the other ISPs.

This is all several months back so I don't have the specific details anymore, but I was getting 500-600ms times between most hops and some of them (the ones that concentrate around Etisalat) were 1000ms plus. Most paths to UK/US servers that I was accessing regularly had 30+ hops in them, the cummulative effect of which was turning Conc's connection into treacle for anything except a long/large sustained download. There was a massively noticeable "it's 7pm and everyone's home now" effect on the connection.

SDB

shinydiscoballs wrote:This is all several months back so I don't have the specific details anymore, but I was getting 500-600ms times between most hops and some of them (the ones that concentrate around Etisalat) were 1000ms plus. Most paths to UK/US servers that I was accessing regularly had 30+ hops in them, the cummulative effect of which was turning Conc's connection into treacle for anything except a long/large sustained download. There was a massively noticeable "it's 7pm and everyone's home now" effect on the connection.

SDB

wow thats alot for latency....the average should be between 300-400. Ok try to send the traceroute to DIC and ask them for an explaination for this. What do the DIC Noc people tell you when you complain about the internet slowness

It wasn't my internet connection at the time (I was a guest staying in concs appartment) so no tickets were raised with DIC. I'll be happy to help concs go through the motions with them though - it's just a question of running some traceroutes at certain times of the day and building a set of consistent results over the course of a week to have evidence of how dire the connection is. I doubt that there's much they can do though.. they're simply growing faster than they can order and implement backbone bandwidth.

SDB