The trend of being online and becoming a part of social networks is growing with each passing day in Pakistan. Today people find it convenient to interact with friends via Twitter and Facebook. According to the major players in the industry (ISPs), at the end of 2013, 1 out 3 Pakistanis is a frequent user of the internet.
I hope you will agree, a healthy competition between the service providers always results in a better service to the end users. The same applies to the internet service providers (ISPs) too. Gone were the days of PTCL monopoly. Today every Pakistani has several options to choose from. Wi-Tribe, LINKdotNET, Worldcall are just a few examples of ISPs in Pakistan. There are many ISPs who operate in specific regions. Currently they are not offering their services across the country. However, they have a good number of subscribers who use their services and are satisfied with them. CyberNet & MultiNet are among the good local ISPs in Pakistan.
Another growing trend in the country is to use mobile internet. The cellular companies in Pakistan e.g. Mobilink, Warid, Ufone are providing mobile internet service at very affordable prices. Recently, Telenor has even announced a free internet service. If you are a Telenor subscriber, you can access Facebook, Wikipedia and Whatsapp absolutely free and there will be no data transfer charges.
Well, enough introduction about the ISPs in Pakistan. The basic purpose of this blog post is to help my readers evaluate the overall performance of their internet service providers. I am not affiliated with any of the services discussed above. Whichever service you choose, just do a couple of things to make sure that you are getting what you have been paying for.
The simplest way to check the speed of your internet connection is to use a brandband speed test service. Go to Speedtest.net and see for yourself if you are getting the same speed that your ISP has promised. As far as my personal experience with PTCL is concerned, I never received more than 0.62-Mbps under a 1-Mbps package.
Another option to test the actual speed and stability of your internet connection is to do a Ping test. A ping test is simply something that will let you know, how much time your internet connection takes to send a packet of data to the web server and receives it back. This test usually measures the duration in milliseconds and the results depend upon the location of a web server. In this example we’ll test how much time your system takes to get you connect with Google.
Open the command prompt by typing cmd in the search box of your Windows start menu. Now type “ping www.google.com” (without quotes) and hit Enter. If the result shows around 150ms on average, congratulations, you have a stable internet connection. But if the average time is more than 250ms etc., you should contact your ISP and inform him about it.
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