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    tomman Mind you - I'm not giving CANT'V just yet... or anytime soon, due to $RAISINS (spoilers: Mom owns the POTS line and she has explicitly forbid me from ever dumping it).

    Oh, I also now need redundancy since I got my first outage on fiber (due to the massive power fuckups we got yesterday), so I'm now in the market for a cheap dual port NIC for the routerbox... and as expected, PCI stuff is made of 100% pure unobtanium, it seems.
    CaptainJistuce Hooray for IPoLASER!
    tomman Time to add some fiber in my diet:


    No, Digitel doesn't sell fiber here. Not directly - I hired with one of the local cablecos now turned into fiber ISPs, 25/25 for $25/mo, which is overpriced even for Venezuelan standards but it was the only ISP that actually served my street and that was not named "Inter".

    Also, had to give up torrents and remote SSH access since those fuckers are not willing to sell me a public IP :/
    But on the flip side: FIBER! No power surge-friendly copper!
    tomman CANTV DSL has been ridiculously unstable since late December in this city. Phone Mafia™ blames "fiber cuts", but how many times you can cut the same cable? (also phone NEVER goes down during said outages). My best guess is some core router at the main exchange that it's finally giving up the ghost, but as expected noone cares at Commie Telephones Of Soviet Venezuela - after all, outages are the best friend of the regime!

    Right now I'm on 4G, and apparently someone at Digitel has been listening:


    ...yes, that's 3G/HSDPA-like performance. But we're coming from subpar 2G speeds to something actually USABLE. Progress at last?
    creaothceann
    Posted by tomman
    Oh, did I mention that it's METERED? Yeah, in 2022 Inter will sell you a 10M plan with 500MB/mo (nope, there is no typo - it's half a metric gigabyte on the base plan)


    With my current speed I'd use that up in ~40 seconds.

    EDIT: "slow internet"
    tomman Half of my sector got their CANTV service zapped again during one of our many, MANY blackouts - apparently a "birdstrike" brought down a high voltage line which fried one of our phone trunk cables. AGAIN. And of course that means a wait time of Math.rand() years. Fortunately I didn't won the "fucked by CANTV" lotto AGAIN, but a neighbor of mine quickly went looking around for a switch.

    We now have the following options in this zone for wired Internet:
    - Craptacular CANTV DSL.
    - Some startup fiber ISP (with the ill-thought name of "ADSL SYSTEM" - guys, fiber is NOT DSL!) with barely any online presence outside Instagranola. 10/10 for $35/M + $120 setup. Support is iffy.
    - One of the regional cablecos (Planet Cable) launched their FTTH service (+Planet), $36/mo + $120 setup buys you 10/10M PLUS 80 channels of useless analog cable. Sadly you can't opt out TV ("it comes for free", said one of their techies while laying fiber lines on my street). Hope their fiber crews give better service than their CATV folks, as Planet also has many, MANY complaints of poor service here.
    - Good ol' deepfryer Inter, with its ever-confusing marketing. They claim "FIBER!!!!", but actually they have not laid fiber in this city AT ALL. Instead, it's good ol' sucktastic DOCSIS. $10/mo + $40 setup (includes a RENTAL cablemodem!) buys you "10M" (no word on upload speeds), with plans up to "250M". Oh, did I mention that it's METERED? Yeah, in 2022 Inter will sell you a 10M plan with 500MB/mo (nope, there is no typo - it's half a metric gigabyte on the base plan), and each additional GB goes for ~8 'murican cents. If you reach ~105GB, your plan becomes unlimited 'till the next month, so the actual real price ends being ~$20/mo.

    Since this neighbor hadn't ditched Inter yet for TV, her natural option was DOCSIS. After a delay of 2 days and 2 faulty Arris cablemodems later, she finally was online. I went for a testdrive, and...


    WTF, she supposedly hired the 10M plan?! Maybe Inter's Speedtest server is cheating, so let's try going outside:


    ...OK, something odd is happening. Either Inter is giving some sort of "welcome bonus", or some slimy cable reseller gladly signed up our lady for the 50M plan (worth $30/mo!). Oh boy, next month's invoice will be a fun one...

    Oh, as you can see, the actual upload speed is close to one measly megabit, so 10/1... or 50/1? Wow, didn't knew DOCSIS sucked as bad as ADSL for upstream...

    For comparison, my small ePeen:


    Oh, and CANTV now offers DSL up to 22/2M, still craptacular but much cheaper than the competition by virtue of being state owned. So what are my chances for a plan upgrade? Let's consult my modem:

    ...ugh, G.dmt!? That means my DSLAM has never been updated past ADSL1 (and most likely will never be until it dies or a falling airplane nukes the phone central), so I'm limited to 8/1. Oh wait, look at that attenuation! Online calculators say my DSLAM is over 2km away (which after checking with OpenStreetMap, it's true!), so I'm further limited to 6M on a sunny day. "Fucked" isn't enough to describe my situation...
    tomman I'm $60 poorer, but FINALLY the CANTV Mafia™ reached to me, and got back to Ye Olde DSL~



    ...as miserable as ever, but I'll take it. For now.
    (apparently there were plenty of charred wires in the path between me and the cable locker, so yeah, blame our commie electricity corporation too)

    I heard the fiber craze finally arrived to my town, but:
    1) Starting at $35/mo for 10/10M! (I currently pay ~$10 for 3/0.75M DSL+phone, with asstacular quality)
    2) No provider covers my zone yet.
    3) None of those providers are CANTV or the mobile incumbents, but a bunch of startups, so quality is unknown.

    However, I HOPE my copper days have a good end, Soon™
    tomman To cap off this tour through our craptacular cellphone connections, and since I still have like 100MB of data to burn before the plan allotments reset, here is Digitel "kinda-4G":



    DL: Only on benchmarks you get "reasonable" speeds... for a DSL 15 years ago! For 3G this is lowend. For LTE this is PATHETIC!

    UL: PATHETIC!

    Somehow the thing didn't dropped back to 3G, but I suspect test results would be similar. Plus, Digitel blocks any external DNS server that isn't 8.8.8.8 (don't come up to me with that D'OH! bullshit, please), and I heard that they're even worse than CANTV when messing with other online services (FWIW, Digitel IPs are even blocked on 4chan, from what I've heard here).

    Also notice that Speedtest now lists DL/UL latencies on the tests, and oh god, those results are absolutely painful!
    tomman Movilnet 3G, in one of those rare times when I actually get it working:



    Surprisingly similar to the 3M DSL I currently have with CANTV (y'know, the one that is broken and it's not getting fixed because I'm on a techie blacklist of sorts and under no circumstances they shall take my bribe money, it seems?). Of course UL and ping is meh, but I'm surprised of the decent-ish DL speeds... but then I'm getting what is basically baseline HSDPA performance, despite the phone (my KrapOS Blu, which currently has been doing the duties of bringing some sort of Internets to this house) claiming HSPA+ service.

    Also, I guess Ookla hasn't gotten the memo: as of 2022 Movilnet and CANTV are now separate state corporations... but then Speedtest reports that my public IP comes from a range usually used for CANTV DSL subscribers, not cellphones. I guess the "separate" bit is only on paper, as divesting assets and infrastructure in a bankrupt communist country is easier said than done.
    tomman And now, a quick recap of Soviet Venezuela's mobile phone data networks:

    2G (GSM):
    Largely irrelevant these days, except for the commie-owned Movilnet ("inclusion", they say... and the sole reason you can still find $15 Chinesium 2G-only turds in the local market). Any (U)SIM card sold by Movistar/Digitel since 2018 or so won't roam on 2G AT ALL, and even if you still own a legacy SIM, chances are that the nearby 2G BTS is either dead or not letting you roam in (tested with my 2012-vintage Movistar 3G USIM: it will see the network where available, but won't register at all). Movistar/Digitel policy on 2G equipment is of plain ol' neglect (maybe upgrade a BTS to 4G when those legacy Huawei station gear die or get stolen).


    3G (UMTS/WCDMA/HS*PA):
    - Movilnet: By far, the worst of the bunch. Don't bother, no matter how desperate you are and how tempting is that 120GB data bonus they're giving away with new activations now. Either the phone will never connect, or will get a blackholed IP (apparently they're now abusing reserved DoD 30.x.x.x IPs for their CGNAT, but if you get assigned one of those, your phone will get absolutely ZERO bytes of data). Maybe once in a blue moon you'll get routed through one of their still working 10.x.x.x IPs, but with high packet loss, sub-megabit DL/UL speeds, and your connection will die in a couple hours at best. Even the long dead CDMA2000 was better than that, people!

    - Movistar: Another bad joke. While this network works consistently better than Movilnet (as in "it can connect to Internet at the first try"), high packet loss and multi-minute stalls are the norm. Forget about any kind of multimedia, or even JPEGs most of the time! Mind you, this behavior is 24/7, so don't even waste your time trying to connect afterhours.

    - Digitel: Somewhere between the frying pan (Movistar) and the fire (Movilnet). Even messaging is almost impossible on good ol' HSPA. Yes, it is THAT bad. Unusable waste of radio spectrum.


    4G (LTE):
    - Movilnet: *crickets* Supposedly they HAVE a live 4G LTE network since 2017, but it's basically on paper. Their 4G footprint is minimal, even after 5 years (for example: my city has NO LTE service yet, despite being a strategic oil city).

    - Movistar: Surprisingly decent! DL is awful (sub-megabit most of the time), but UL is awesome. Low packet loss, good pings, almost no stalls. Slow but stable, almost like early DSL. Sadly in my place coverage is kinda marginal, so my phone is always balancing between "live" and "NO SIGNAL". While my city got 4G relatively early in the game, coverage is still patchy at best, with most of the city having no LTE service yet.

    - Digitel: See 3G section. There is absolutely ZERO difference between UMTS and LTE on Digitel, despite being the first to shower our local airwaves with 4G LTE "progress". It is THAT bad, folks!


    My predictions on 5G in Soviet Venezuela: same tired shit of many-G's working at sub-GPRS performance. Movistar has a chance to actually bring 3.5G speeds to 5G... but then Telefonica has been kinda busy trying to GTFO Latam for the last few years (and my commie hellhole has MOST of the blame on that, being one of the former Telefonica cash cows back in the BlackBerry era). Maduro will have his paper 5G network, and Digitel will stick to its consistently awful service. Of course no matter which telco you choose, your bills will inflate every month: pay more for less, just because~
    desudesu

    Honestly. it's not that bad considering I live in the UK. Kinda annoyed it doesn't have the '% faster/slower than' anymore on OOKLA, though.
    desudesu Reminds me of how in the UK our mobile internet sometimes yields faster speeds than fibre-optic because Openreach are monopolistic wankers.

    (Well, Virgin also have lines, but not everyone wants their front gardens/driveways dug up for them to be installed...)

    tomman Movistar "4G", right now:


    - Download: Marginally better than EDGE (that is, 2G on steroids). Can't even reach good ol' EvDO levels!
    - Upload: WTF. Apparently I'm maxing out USB1.1 bandwidth here! Apparently "reverse ADSL" is now a thing?
    tomman To finish a shitty weekend of blackouts, charred network gear, and horrible things in general, after windy rains and yet another 6-hour blackout, my CANTV line is REALLY dead this time.

    I heard the CANTV Mafia™ is now charging $100+ to repair your phone... but then they're working very under the radar as they face prosecution, both inside and outside.

    Ah well, back for the shitty 0.3G cellphones for the next 3 years? Now with a 4G Digitel line that it's Beyond Useless.
    desudesu I thought it was about just internet number bragging in general. (Not that I'm sharing my internet speeds because they're British and therefore are crap.)

    Thanks though, onee-chan... snuggles up tight
    Kawaoneechan This is about connection speeds but it's funny so I'll allow this.
    desudesu At least now I can brag I have managed to get post #6969.

    I know, totally mature. Ha fucking ha.
    creaothceann

    My upload speed is now almost my previous download speed.
    shadowinthelight
    Just moved in with gf. Her internet is definitely faster than mine was but seems to hiccup more often as well...
    CaptainJistuce

    Just thought I'd remind everyone who rules the roost.
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