First of, @jacobincambodia, for somebody who has no affiliation with Sinet, you do put a lot of effort in promoting them (every 440 threads, twitter, facebook...).
Note: Not in PP
The answer is not that straight forward. It all comes down to what you use Internet for.
I went with Sinet 3 months go with the 660$/year package. Basically my choice was Metfone or Sinet. I had Metfone in the past and although the speed was fine, the line was very unreliable. I sent an inquiry email to Sinet, got a very detailed response within 15mn and thought this was quite impressive for Cambodia. Sales guy was also very good.
In terms of reliability, my line went down twice in 3 months, for short periods of time. They attach the cable in the street with that black electrical tape which comes off...
Now, speed. I am not very knowledgeable about networking so please correct my assumptions if they're wrong.
What they sell you is a 15 mbps line to HK. What I think you get is 15 Mbps bandwidth but roughly 2 to 5 Mbps "speed" (it had been 2Mbps for the last 3 months but recently got better).
When testing a few months ago, they seemed to be caching/proxying google, facebook and youtube which meant you had very good speed for these. As I write this and check again it does not seem to be the case anymore.
Where they get a little chicky is that they (support staff) assure you that you get 15 Mbps "speed" to HK and ask you to test using ookla speedtest.net . Amazingly, using speedtest, you get a consistent 15 Mbps "speed". Now try using any other test sites/methods and you go back to 2 Mbps (at the time).
I asked support why I would get 15 Mbps with speedtest but 2 Mbps downloading a file from Azure in HK. After telling me that it was probably Azure's fault, they asked me to install a firefox plugin to do multithreaded downloads and if I used enough threads, I would then get my "full speed".
What this tells me is:
1. They do throttle your speed but you do have 15 Mbps bandwidth
2. They did some kind of optimization for speedtest (plenty of reports online of ISPs doing that but haven't found their method yet)
After pointing that to the staff, they simply stopped replying to my mails.
International:
For 3 months it has been absolutely terrible. I could not even access most of the US sites. So much so that I had to purchase a VPN to be able to work.
It finally got solved in the last week or 2. To be honest, I'm not sure Sinet is to blame. It could be any of their partner and it also seemed there were some major issues with Level3 in the US.
Conclusion: Since I use the Internet mostly for other things than facebook and mostly not through a browser, I won't renew that subscription. I'll go for Metfone with the same speed at half price and a fail-over 4G connection for when Metfone goes down.
TL;DR
At the time of writing,
http://testmy.net/,
http://www.azurespeed.com/Azure/Download
about 600 KB/s from HK, 150 KB/s from California, 80 KB/s from London
You mainly use Facebook/Google and value reliability: not a bad option
Anything else: probably cheaper to go with Metfone and a fail-over solution.
First of, @jacobincambodia, for somebody who has no affiliation with Sinet, you do put a lot of effort in promoting them (every 440 threads, twitter, facebook...).
Note: Not in PP
The answer is not that straight forward. It all comes down to what you use Internet for.
I went with Sinet 3 months go with the 660$/year package. Basically my choice was Metfone or Sinet. I had Metfone in the past and although the speed was fine, the line was very unreliable. I sent an inquiry email to Sinet, got a very detailed response within 15mn and thought this was quite impressive for Cambodia. Sales guy was also very good.
In terms of reliability, my line went down twice in 3 months, for short periods of time. They attach the cable in the street with that black electrical tape which comes off...
Now, speed. I am not very knowledgeable about networking so please correct my assumptions if they're wrong.
What they sell you is a 15 mbps line to HK. What I think you get is 15 Mbps bandwidth but roughly 2 to 5 Mbps "speed" (it had been 2Mbps for the last 3 months but recently got better).
When testing a few months ago, they seemed to be caching/proxying google, facebook and youtube which meant you had very good speed for these. As I write this and check again it does not seem to be the case anymore.
Where they get a little chicky is that they (support staff) assure you that you get 15 Mbps "speed" to HK and ask you to test using ookla speedtest.net . Amazingly, using speedtest, you get a consistent 15 Mbps "speed". Now try using any other test sites/methods and you go back to 2 Mbps (at the time).
I asked support why I would get 15 Mbps with speedtest but 2 Mbps downloading a file from Azure in HK. After telling me that it was probably Azure's fault, they asked me to install a firefox plugin to do multithreaded downloads and if I used enough threads, I would then get my "full speed".
What this tells me is:
1. They do throttle your speed but you do have 15 Mbps bandwidth
2. They did some kind of optimization for speedtest (plenty of reports online of ISPs doing that but haven't found their method yet)
After pointing that to the staff, they simply stopped replying to my mails.
International:
For 3 months it has been absolutely terrible. I could not even access most of the US sites. So much so that I had to purchase a VPN to be able to work.
It finally got solved in the last week or 2. To be honest, I'm not sure Sinet is to blame. It could be any of their partner and it also seemed there were some major issues with Level3 in the US.
Conclusion: Since I use the Internet mostly for other things than facebook and mostly not through a browser, I won't renew that subscription. I'll go for Metfone with the same speed at half price and a fail-over 4G connection for when Metfone goes down.
TL;DR
At the time of writing, http://testmy.net/, http://www.azurespeed.com/Azure/Download
about 600 KB/s from HK, 150 KB/s from California, 80 KB/s from London
You mainly use Facebook/Google and value reliability: not a bad option
Anything else: probably cheaper to go with Metfone and a fail-over solution.