Nepal Telecom upgraded its ADSL to 5 Mbps on February 9th. This is company’s 14th Anniversary offer to people. Previously NTC was providing 1 Mbps broadband service. The service actually came into action on February 11 only. We tested the new upgraded service and it is 5 Mbps on Speed Test as told. Still there are some things that are not clear to many users regarding local content, speed and cache servers.
NTC is trying hard to cope with private ISP competition these days. They upgraded to 384 Kbps about a year ago then within short duration it became 1 Mbps. At first we had 128, 256 and 512 Kbps service. After few years the packages became 192, 384 and 512 Kbps. The company also gave 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps service just few years ago at very high price.
As the competition of private ISP drove up, NTC started loosing lots of customers. Then they upgraded their basic broadband to 1 Mbps. People got about 2 Mbps in all sites on that package. Now from 2018 February 9th Nepal Doorsanchar Company Limited is providing 5 Mbps at Rs 1000.
Test and Experience: Previously when the package was 1 Mbps we got 2 Mbps service. It was stated in site that local content will be served at 2 Mbps. Now our ADSL Modem plus Router shows Data Rate as 5120 Kbps Downstream and 513 Kbps upstream. This is ideal state which means we are not affected by distance from exchange or line attenuation.
In our test at SpeedTest.net, we tried many servers of Nepal and India. Test with NTC, Worldlink and Subisu servers showed download speed of average 526 KB/s or 4.3 Mbps. The average upload speed was 0.40 Mbps. Things change when we change the servers to foreign land or far land. Indian servers showed higher Ping as usual but the download speed is only about 2.5 Mbps but upload speed is same.
We tested YouTube, P2P service, Social media sites etc. Popular YouTube videos ran smoothly at 1080p and 720p without issue. Other videos also run fantastic at 480p quality. YouTube Video download also occur at 500 KB/s average. Videos on Facebook, Twitter also stream smoothly without interruption. Files and software downloads from popular sites ran at 220 KB/s and same was the case with P2P file sharing.
This is due to local cache servers in Nepal. NTC installed first YouTube cache server few years back in Nepal. Such servers help people get access to popular sites fast and also save companies bandwidth cost. We found that surfing sites, browsing social media, watching YouTube are fabulous with new NTC ADSL upgrade. They are as told by company in 5 Mbps but content in farther location are slow by few quarters.
Future: As a normal user, it is a great improvement but still there is a long way to become leader. Movies and shows stream smoothly in Netflix and Amazon Prime. The downtime is absolutely zero since 1 year for me. Still private ISP give far superior speed which is incomparable to NTC. This is great for people who have high bandwidth demand.
Whole world is moving to Optical Fiber in name of FTTH. NTA is also demanding Nepal Telecom to do so. They are actually expanding Fiber but slowly. The upgrade is appreciable but now we want to see their service in FTTH in much more better and reasonable package. It is sure that this old technology with copper wire is going to be replaced by much advanced system very soon. Share us your experience and thoughts on this topic and their service.
Hey whoever the author of this post is, I wanna know how is it possible that you are getting 5 mbps and we don’t. By the way, I’m from Jhapa. It seems like NTC is giving us fake offers. I HATE YOU NTC.
Many people are getting 5 Mbps on selected sites but other sites at at 2 Mbps till now. Some areas in Kathmandu also have not got the update as far as we know. It seems like it is going in process. Do talk to your local NTC office about the problem because we are getting 5 Mbps on YouTube and other few sites.