| Netfront 1.5Mbit vs Netvigator 4M/4M business broadband
Comparing the performance of two ISPs is a pretty tricky job as there you have to concurrently access many destinations to be able to test all the circuits and ISP may have. We are right now rebuilding our Search HK engine which is perfect to do comparisions of ISPs opens about 200 concurrent connections to websites. Note that this test only reports performance intra HK, as 95% of the sites we are hitting are are in Hong Kong. It does not test their international bandwidth.
We ran the crawls on a 1.5Mbit circuit whilst we got the grip of things, then tried a 4M/4M symetric before move search hk to a datacenter.
Netfront: ADSL 1.5Mbit/512Kbit Netfront PPPoE using PCCW circuits and to connect to Netfront backbone via ATM.
Netvigator Business Broadband: 4M/4M vDSL circuit when crawling HK websites
Netfront would max at a sustained rate of about 198KB/s. 1.584Mbit
Netvigator: would max at a sustained rate of about 210KB/s. 1.680Mbit and peaks in short burstst at 2.2Mbit out of the declared 4M/4M symmetric.
Neither of both ISPs should experience congestion on their HK back bones as the bandwith is there, but Netvigator clearly has oversold its ADSL network by a huge factor. Netfront on the other hand manages to burst above the declared specs of the circuit as their ADSL is clear even thought the circuits are provided by PCCW. This confirms what I have known for a long time that ISPs that use PCCW circuits demmand and get a much higher level of service than if you go to PCCW direct.
Cost of circuits
Netfront: HK$598 with 32 IPs.
Netvigator: HK$790 with 8 IPs (6 usable)  | 
