Broadband internet - does it live up to speed claims?

Its been a year since ive been back to Mauritius and unless they have worked heavily on their Internet provisions I would say that the speeds they are claiming you will get are not so true... I have heard from some peeps that the closer you are to Cyber City the faster your internet connection (not sure about this though).

As for internet going down due to weather, I have never experienced a shut down on my internet because of weather but then again I am only in Mauritius for 2-3 months at a time a year for now.

Ultimately though, I think we should remember that Mauritius is a small island with the most developed IT infrastructure in Africa so whatever we are getting I think we should be thankful for.

Hope the above helps :-)

Andrew,

I've been on the island for 5+ years now, and the service has steadily improved while I've been here. We got a free speed bump last year (everyone at 512Kbps was upped to 1Mbps, everyone at 1Mbps to 2Mbps, etc.) and the connection has generally been stable (though I once had to force them re-string our line since there were physical/environmental problems at the local pole).

If you do a lot of torrenting and configure your firewall correctly, you can easily get the full rated speed. To be sure, it's nowhere near the performance of my 20Mbps cable line in the U.S., however, it's enough to make pulling down a few American sitcoms and a movie or two possible over the course of a day (start them in the morning, you have something to watch that evening).

Streaming, on the other hand, is hit or miss due to the high latency. And interactive/online gaming is pretty much out of the question (i.e. no Battlefield multi-player). But general browsing is fine - just expect a couple of seconds between pages as the site responds and the content starts to flow downstream.

Note: I'm basing the above on the 2Mbps MyT package. And I live fairly close (a couple of miles) to Ebene, so not sure if this makes a difference (the closer to a Central Office, the faster the possible line speed - that's just how ADSL works).

One minor gripe is that, if I've got a full-speed download running, I often get artifacts/stuttering of the digital TV signal, which makes no sense since the raw connection to the local C/O is 4Mbps+ (and I'm only using half of that for the download). But this can be mitigated by using a download manager and restricting bandwidth usage per active download.

Anyway, hope that helps!

RCK

thanks for the replies. Very helpful. I'm thinking the 2Mbps is going to be enough for me. I guess you can always upgrade it to 4Mbps if its not.
Andrew