broadband

21st century is finally here with PrimeTel Fibernet

The apartment building where I live in for the last few years had some cabling issues. That prevented me from joining the rest of the world in the 21st century, when it comes to home Internet connectivity. Here’s what I’ve been on until today:

Today, I’ve got my connection updated. PrimeTel Fibernet, which is currently only available to select buildings, brought the modern age of technology into my house. Here’s how it looks:

Yup, that’s a 50 Mbps download with 8 Mbps upload connection. Nearly a 10x speed increase, but not only that. Have a look at 1 ms ping now vs. 35 ms ping before. And that all is for the same price. And nothing else had to change – I still have the same TV channels and the same landline number. Ah, no, wait, my home IP address changed, but who cares about that, right?

This thing is so far indeed, that to fully utilize it I need to use the Ethernet cable. Gladly, that’s how both my PlayStation 3 and the home media server are connected. With my laptop’s WiFi, I get the numbers like this:

I’m not yet sure why, but I’ll probably need to look into my wireless card drivers or something.

Anyways, WiFi or not, it’s way faster than it used to be, both in bandwidth and latency. Which are amazing news!

P.S.: Thanks to SpeedTest.net for cool graphics and years in service too.

European Parliament votes to end roaming charges, expand consumer rights and make it easier to create better telecoms

Today the European Parliament voted to end roaming charges by Christmas 2015, as part of a wider vote in support to the Commission’s proposed regulation for a “Connected Continent” (telecoms single market)*.

PrimeTel maintenance

I just received an email from PrimeTel, informing me of a scheduled maintenance work. Just in case you didn’t get yours, here is the content of that email:

Dear Valued Customer,

This is to inform you that due to scheduled maintenance of our network infrastructure, you will experience service outages during the following period:

30/05/2011, from 04:00 am to 05:00 am Cyprus time.

It is expected that the total downtime shall not exceed 30 minutes and we will do our best to keep it minimal.
We apologize for any inconvenience and please do not hesitate to contact us for further information.

PrimeTel Support Team
Customer Support Service: 133

Free WiFi to be introduced on Cyprus buses

Cyprus Updates shares the following:

Internet access will be available via wifi for free to passengers of Nicosia buses by next month. The service will start intiially on route 158 (Nisou – Pera Chorio) and then will be expanded to the rest of the routes. Furthermore, by 2012 buses will be equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) which will allow tracking of their location and subsequently provide information to the passengers within the bus as well as at the bus stops.

I wish there was a confirmed authentic source for this rumor. Even with that it would be difficult to believe. This sounds more like Google experiment than Cyprus public transportation roadmap. Great news if it will ever get implemented!

How’s your PrimeTel connection doing?

Just before the New Year, I’ve posted the good news from PrimeTel – free increase in the connection speed for all subscribers. I was excited back than. But over the last few days I had a number of discussions with a number of people and most of them seemed to complain about the degraded quality of service – speeds were not up, connection is not stable, and so on and so forth. On one hand, I trust all these people. On the other hand, my connection is doing fine. Compared to speed tests that I did in December, I see better results now. And I haven’t had any of the other problems.

So I am interested in hearing what are your experiences like. Have you seen any changes in speed? Have you seen any change in quality of service? Have you seen any differences since the New Year at all? Please let me know via the comments or directly.