primetel

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.

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

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.

Good news from PrimeTel

Yes, I know, I am biased when I talk about PrimeTel, since I used to work there and still have a lot of friends there. But even with that, how can one not be happy about great news that came in via SMS today:

Your Internet speed will double as of 1/1/2011 with no additional charge. Happy New Year from PrimeTel!

I am getting 4.5 – 5.5 Mbps on my 4 Mbps PrimeTel subscription. With this new upgrade it seems I’ll be getting somewhere around 10 Mbps. Excellent present – thank you PrimeTel!

Updated: You might also want to read this article in Cyprus Mail.

PrimeTel submarine fiber landing station

(Can you pack any more technology terms into that title?)

Apparently, PrimeTel is working hard on improving broadband connectivity on the island of Cyprus. In this blog post, Vladimir Ivaschenko links to this article, which explains:

PrimeTel is building a new, independent, privately owned Submarine landing station in Yeroskipos, Cyprus as per the global specifications of Reliance Globalcom. It aims to gain access to new international cables and capacity, and has secured 5Gbps of capacity globally with an option for further upgrades in the future. The project is expected to be completed by 2009.

This sounds very cool, and I hope that the project will be completed on time and that we all, broadband users, will benefit from it. (Not that it will stop any of the local forums whining about Cyprus connectivity options or anything.)