How good is broadband in Gib?

Hi blparker,

I suggest you to go through the link below where you might be able to compare the best broadband provider that fit your needs and expectation.

• http://www.broadbandchoice.co.uk/compar … gibraltar/

Hope this might help.

Thank you,

David.

Thanks David, I didn;t realise Gib woudl be covered by that site!

Is the info accurate though?  For example do you really have Virgin 50Mb Broadband available?

Also, the advertised speeds and the actual speeds are often not the same.  Does anyone have any information on how close they are to true speeds?

most companies listed on the site you pointed me to are in the 16Mb region, which compared to my current broadband, is awesome!  Do you really get these kinds of speeds in Gib?

blparker wrote:

Thanks David, I didn;t realise Gib woudl be covered by that site!

Its not!!!

Take a look here http://www.sapphire.gi/residential/internet or here http://www.gibtele.com/products-service … rvices.php

blparker wrote:

Thanks David, I didn;t realise Gib woudl be covered by that site!

Is the info accurate though?  For example do you really have Virgin 50Mb Broadband available?

Also, the advertised speeds and the actual speeds are often not the same.  Does anyone have any information on how close they are to true speeds?

most companies listed on the site you pointed me to are in the 16Mb region, which compared to my current broadband, is awesome!  Do you really get these kinds of speeds in Gib?

NO

Std home internet is 4Mb or should I say it is supposed to be, I generally get around 3Mb but it is often less, this comes at a cost of £32 per month, includes telephone but no free calls.You can upgrade to 8 or 20Mb at costs of £62 & £92 I believe.

The service is TERRIBLE The 4Mb service includes up to 5 email addresses. I applied for an extra email ( making 2 in total ) it took 4 months

Grumpy

Hahaha!

Thanks GrumpyOldBloke, I must admit that was more the response i was expecting!

3Mb is do-able, just about!

Can anyone do me a favour?  I don;t mean to get too technical, but could someone open up a command prompt (start / cmd.exe) and type the following, and then post the results?

tracert 54.229.157.224

that should give some info about connecting to the Amazon datacenter in Ireland which is where a number of my systems live...  (the ip address is mine, i'm not asking anyone to spam anything! )

Hi
As requested with my personal info edited

I then did an OOKLA speedtest on Lisbon

Ping 62  Download  3.28  Upload 0.46 which is possibly better than average.

C:\Users\GRUMPY>tracert 54.229.157.224

Tracing route to ec2-54-229-157-224.eu-west-1.compu
224]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    22 ms    99 ms   100 ms  BThomehub.home
  2    14 ms    20 ms    11 ms  172.31.1.2
  3    13 ms    12 ms    14 ms  212.120.252.217
  4    55 ms    50 ms    49 ms  212.120.252.243
  5    49 ms    48 ms    51 ms  195.66.225.175
  6    59 ms    64 ms    59 ms  178.236.3.51
  7    62 ms    75 ms    63 ms  176.32.106.27
  8    63 ms    62 ms    63 ms  178.236.0.171
  9    59 ms    59 ms    69 ms  178.236.0.200
10    62 ms    59 ms    59 ms  178.236.0.221
11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
26     *        *        *     Request timed out.
27     *        *        *     Request timed out.
28     *        *        *     Request timed out.
29     *        *        *     Request timed out.
30     *        *        *     Request timed out.

I am no expert here, but what does all that mean regards the internet in Gib???   Apart from being not great and expensive?

OK, so each line is one step along the journey between Grumpy's router and my Amazon server. 

The times are for how long it takes to send a message from Grumpy's laptop to the step, and back again. 

The first two are Grumpys router and his connection to his ISP in Gibraltar.  These aren't that useful because this is before it has broken out in to the proper internet.  After that we can get some idea of how well connected Gib is to the rest of Europe.

1    22 ms    99 ms   100 ms  BThomehub.home  <-- Grumpys router
  2    14 ms    20 ms    11 ms  172.31.1.2              <-- Grumpy's ISP
  3    13 ms    12 ms    14 ms  212.120.252.217    <-- Gibraltar
  4    55 ms    50 ms    49 ms  212.120.252.243    <-- Gibraltar
  5    49 ms    48 ms    51 ms  195.66.225.175      <-- London
  6    59 ms    64 ms    59 ms  178.236.3.51          <-- Dublin (Amazon Data Center)
  7    62 ms    75 ms    63 ms  176.32.106.27        <-- Dublin (ADC)
  8    63 ms    62 ms    63 ms  178.236.0.171        <-- Dublin (ADC)
  9    59 ms    59 ms    69 ms  178.236.0.200        <-- Dublin (ADC)
10    62 ms    59 ms    59 ms  178.236.0.221        <-- Dublin (ADC)

So the interesting thing was that there appears to be a direct route from Gibraltar to London.  In some ways thats good news since it bypasses Spain.  There would obviously be some worries if Spain had the opportunity to disconnect Gibraltar from the internet!  Most likely this is a fibre optic cable running under the sea.

All in all, 65ms isn't too bad.  I am in the South West of England, and I get ~45-50ms times, so an extra 15ms down to Gib is pretty good. 

I think the likely cause of poor internet is that the bandwidth in and out of Gib is shared between everyone, so assuming everyone in Gib has broadband (~30,000 people), and they are all using it at the same time, and the total capacity in and out of Gib is 1000Mb (1Gb) then actually, the bandwidth each person would get would be 0.03333Mb or to look at it in the old Dial-Up terms, 33Kb.  When dial-up died off, the standard was 56Kb, although it was rarely possible to get more than 75% of that speed.

Now the good(ish) news it that it's very unlikely that every singe user in Gib will use traffic simultaneously, but i would guess that if even 10% of users are watching iPlayer (can you get iPlayer in Gib?) then things will slow to a crawl.

I am also guessing that the bandwidth in and out is shared with businesses, many of which are running 24x7 to some degree, and most likely get priority.

I have no idea what the actual bandwidth for all of Gibraltar is, it may be way higher than 1Gb (I would kind of hope so given the number of Internet based companies in Gib!) but as you can see, the amount you actually get is likely to be less than ideal.

For a comparison, I did the same speedtest with Ookla, both from home and from work (where the internet breaks out in the center of the US)

Work: ping: 150ms Up: 2.59Mb Down: 0.52Mb
Home: ping: 88ms Up: 2.83Mb Down: 0.67Mb

So it looks like, in terms of general connectivity, Gib isn't too bad.  Most likely the total available bandwidth is the big issue, and it's hard to know if there is anything that could be done about that without some major infrastructure investment....

Anyway, i'll stop the tech talk now, thank you for the testing, it's really helpful!

blparker wrote:

So the interesting thing was that there appears to be a direct route from Gibraltar to London.  In some ways thats good news since it bypasses Spain.  There would obviously be some worries if Spain had the opportunity to disconnect Gibraltar from the internet!  Most likely this is a fibre optic cable running under the sea.


I have no idea what the actual bandwidth for all of Gibraltar is, it may be way higher than 1Gb (I would kind of hope so given the number of Internet based companies in Gib!) but as you can see, the amount you actually get is likely to be less than ideal.

For a comparison, I did the same speedtest with Ookla, both from home and from work (where the internet breaks out in the center of the US)

Work: ping: 150ms Up: 2.59Mb Down: 0.52Mb
Home: ping: 88ms Up: 2.83Mb Down: 0.67Mb

So it looks like, in terms of general connectivity, Gib isn't too bad.  Most likely the total available bandwidth is the big issue, and it's hard to know if there is anything that could be done about that without some major infrastructure investment....

A little extra info

http://www.gibtele.com/about-us/news/ne … vation.phphttp://www.panorama.gi/localnews/headli … ticle=4966

Ref iPlayer BBC is available here without any fiddling  ITVPlayer requires fiddling

Grumpy

Those articles are pretty good news, looks like there is quite a diverse number of connections out of Gib!

Good to know iPlayer works!

That is really interesting stuff, feel I have learned something about the internet.   

I can tell you a few more things:

iplayer is available in Gib but other services for ITV are not.   However, you can get a lot of TV channels here in a bundle so most probably do not use iplayer so that would lessen the burden on the Gib system.

Internet is far more expensive here compared to the UK and my UK IT asked me to ask about datacentre costs in Gib and in short one months server hosting costs here were equal to a whole year in the UK.  So the environment isn't cost effective for "cloud" businesses to host.

As for not going through Spain, that is indeed good news.   Gib also produces its own electricity, this can be a little temperamental at times, power cuts do occur but at least we are not at risk of Spain pulling the plug on our power or water so there is a good degree of self sufficiency here. 

Hope that was useful

From what I have been able to find out, most of the big gaming companies are hosting from outside of Gib anyway.  I guess it's a good point because some of the big hosting companies have things like co-located data centers etc, so it adds an extra layer of resilience to their systems.

It's good to know you get a lot of channels, i guess you;re right, best not to use the online services if it can be avoided!

Internet service providers in Gibraltar

There is the good old Gibtelecom now with gibtele.com/fibrebroadband
There is now also gibfibrespeed.com
There is also one that I can't find. Their name is
ume.com or youme.com or hume.com or something like that? Does anyone know?

LeifGib wrote:

Internet service providers in Gibraltar

There is the good old Gibtelecom now with gibtele.com/fibrebroadband
There is now also gibfibrespeed.com
There is also one that I can't find. Their name is
ume.com or youme.com or hume.com or something like that? Does anyone know?

u-mee.com which becomes - fibretothehome.gi

I would think that the internet pipe coming out of Gib is pretty bloody big considering all the online gaming places being based there. Maybe they host outside of Gib but I recently had a friend do some consultancy work in Gib for one of the big companies so they must have some kind of infrastructure based there.


Saying that I guess all the phone lines going to the residential buildings are pretty old now.. Also the net seems quite expensive there because basically one company has the market and can kind of charge what they like LOL..

Still as posted above looks like things might be getting better there soon


Looking into it a bit more it looks like it has one major pipe connection.

- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_India_Gateway
- submarinecablemap.com/#/

Looking at the above map it looks like another passes right by but is not connected to gib.