June 4, 2005

Telkomnet Instan Premium Dial Up User Speed Test

Telkomnet Indonesia introduced a “new” product, faster surfing with a dial up modem, called “Telkomnet Instan Premium“. The adverstising promised a 10 times faster connection, so I was highly interested, because I live in an area where my choice is dial-up with a 56k modem or a satelite system of some sort.

The Premium dial up service costs extra, another 135 rupiah per minute, on top of the 165 rupiah per minute normal price; a total of 300 rupiah per minute. Total of about 1.8 USD per hour.

To use the fast connection, you need a special dialer which can be downloaded from the Telkom site, and an I-VAS card. The I-VAS card is a pre-paid type card, with scratch numbers you need as username and password for the Premium service. The card comes in 25.000, 50.000 and 100.000 rupiah versions.

Technology is supplied by Surfision, a company in Singapore and is called Quiksurfer, you can read their product description here:

http://www.surfision.com.sg/modules/enterprise/aboutus.php?item=2

I tried to find some more information about Quiksurfer on the Internet, and as far as I can tell Quiksurfer, or at least some version of a similar product going by the same name was available as a free download. Most pages where it could be downloaded have been removed, as well as the user reviews. In Googles cache I found some remains of an average user review of 48% out of 100%.

You can download a free trail version of Quiksurfer here:

http://asia.cnet.com/downloads/pc/swinfo/0,39000587,39087768s,00.htm

It also promises 10 times speed improvement ?

How does it work? (If you just want to read my conclusion only, scroll down)

If you use the Telkomnet Premium Dailer, the requests that your browser sends, go to a special proxy server, where the Quiksurfer software handles the requests. The Dialer configures Internet Explorer to use the proxy. It doesn’t configure other browsers, but proprierty software that uses the Internet Settings from IE can be used with the Premium Dialer, like Symantec Liveupdate. Other browsers can be configured manually.

When your browser sends a request for a file, the proxy gets the file, and the Quiksurfer software checks if it can compress the file, and send it in compressed form over the modem line where it will be decompressed by the client software on your PC. Some files, like text files and most html files, are easily compressed, so this is where Quiksurfer is at its best, and a large improvement in speed is seen. Other files like zip, mpg and jpg files already have there own compression, and therefore can’t be compressed much further and the Quiksurf software can only improve a bit on the speed. Most modern websites already use GZIP compression, build in in Internet Explorer, so the speed improvement there is little.

To make up for the inability to compress certain file types, the Quiksurf software compresses files that have a lossy type of compression, like jpg files, even more and therefore degrades the quality of pictures. A simple test showed that a jpg, already compressed to 33.2 kb was compressed even more to 7.13 kb, with a very visible loss of quality. Its a pitty you cannot turn of the extra compression of picture files, because most graphic websites viewed with the Telkomnet Premium service, simply look much worse then usual.

Some speed tests

I did some simple speed tests, but I did not take a “scientific approach”, I have just done them once. I should have done them on different times of the day, and several times to get a good idea of the overal figures, but I think I have been fair to the product.

http://network.msu.edu/public/speedtest.html

With Telkomnet Premium:

Your test file size: 128 KB
Elapsed time: 26.8 seconds.
Your LAN connection Speed: 38.3kbps.
Your effective Dial-up connection Speed: 47.9kbps.

Without Telkomnet Premium:

Your test file size: 128 KB
Elapsed time: 29.7 seconds.
Your LAN connection Speed: 34.5kbps.
Your effective Dial-up connection Speed: 43.1kbps.

Conclusion: no significant difference, repeated tests will be closer in speed.

http://performance.toast.net

Compressable text

Normal 56K Modem: 70-90K
With Telkomnet Premium: Your throughput: 154* K
Without Telkomnet Premium: Your throughput: 68* K

Big gain in speed here.

Jpeg Shuttle Picture

33.6K Modem: 16-27K
56K Modem: 34-45K
ISDN/I-DSL: 100-120K
With Telkomnet Premium: 321 K
Without Telkomnet Premium: Your throughput: 40 K

Very big gain in speed, but the picture has degraded considerably in quality!

(note: If you are planning to do some testing yourself, please remember, depending on your IE cache settings, that the pictures downloaded by the Premium connection may overwrite the pictures in the browser cache, and that if you use your ordinary connection again, the Premium files still show..)

http://www.intel.com/personal/resources/broadband/speedtest.htm

With Telkomnet Premium: 33.1 kbps
Without Telkomnet Premium: 33.7 kbps

No difference in speed.

I tried downloading an ordinary (compressed) .exe file, but I did not see a significant speed difference. Same speed as with ordinary Telkomnet Instan.

During the use I found that some websites did not want to load, did not find out why, but one of them was a part of one of my own websites, a gzipped forum. Other gzipped forums did load, as well as other gzipped sites.

Conclusion

In overall use I find that the Telkomnet Premium service makes browsing feel quick, quicker then usual. But it comes at a price, loss of quality… and therefore cannot be used by webdesigners, photographers or lovers of art, because the pictures look crippled.

Don’t expect that you can download that 20 megabyte file now as if it was a 2 megabyte file. It will still be 20 megabyte, and download at the same speed as before, unless its an uncompressed textfile.

The 10 times speed improvement that is promised, is simply not possible. Under certain optimal conditions, uncompressed text files, uncompressed webpages and scripts, there is a significant improvement, but the overall speed gain is low.

I didn’t seriously try any streaming video or audio, but my guess is that because of the already existing compression in these kind of files, the speed gain must be minimal.

Your FTP connections are not accelerated…

I am afraid that Telkomnet Premium doesn’t give your computer a broadband connection, but it tries hard, with some tricks, to look like it.

If you are young, wait for the DSL roll out of Telkom

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