[Slugnet] Getting Online in SG?

[Michael Clark]

Chris Henry wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 7:12 AM, Patrick Haller <slug at haller.ws> wrote:
>   
>> Anyone have any comments good/bad about StarHub, PacNet, or MobileOne?
>>     
>
> Just to share my friends' experience: recently, 2 friends of mine kept
> having connectivity problems with StarHub Cable. They weren't able to
> access some websites (including gmail!!); they are pretty frustrated
> because StarHub customer service didn't help much.
>   

I have been using Starhub cable for about 9 years - it has had its ups 
and downs but overall it has been mostly good for me.

The quality of the physical cabling you use, the number of devices in 
your apartment connected to it, and the particular condo or development 
you are located in all seem to make a difference (older places can be 
problematic). Sometimes just changing the cable to the wall can solve 
most of the problems (the supplied ones can be dodgy).

For locally severed or akamized content I can most often get the 
advertised 12Mbs bandwidth of my plan (roughly 1.5MBytes/sec). For 
traffic to US or Europe it is more likely to be 1-2Mbs which is a fairly 
common sort of over subscription ratio and I am reasonably happy with 
it. The outbound is 384Kbps which I also seem to be able to get 
(although their bandwidth management makes it a bit choppy). When stuff 
is not mirrored locally, I tend to go for a mirror in Japan for which I 
think Starhub has quite good connectivity to.

I do have some problems though... Starhub transparent caching seems to 
break access to a few websites. For me it is mainly the Apple iPhone 
Developer web site <http://developer.apple.com/iphone/>. It is very 
broken for me and sometimes unusable with it constantly asking me to 
re-authenticate (may be due to the cache source IP changing and Apple's 
session management using the IP address - or perhaps borken HTTP cache 
related headers from Apple's server - I don't know but it is really 
broken). It all works perfectly on Singtel mobile broadband so I'm 
certain it is Starhub transparent caching related.

This problem is too hard for their customer service to handle so I get 
around this buy running openvpn to a slice hosted in the US, and then 
selectively routing Apple's subnets over that VPN.

~mc