Hello everyone (or anyone), I suppose I'd better announce myself, seeing as I've taken the trouble to register Paul, from South Yorks, married to Lanie from Bohol for over 5 years now. Lanie gained Brit Cit 4 months ago, and has just gone to Bohol for 3 weeks to try out her UK passport... I'll probably get into trouble for talking to strangers, so you ain't seen me, right? Cheers, all
Hey Paul, welcome to the site.. Your mahal is from Bohol? That is one island I really intend on visiting soon.. And congrats on the British citizenship for your wife, no doubt she loved walking through the security checks in Manila and flashed it to the guards
Manila? The flight was supposed to be to Cebu! And as for flashing, I'm not sure she has a licence for that... I'll have a word with her in the morning, then Oh, and Bohol is well worth a visit. Be quick, though: it's getting very popular and very expensive...
Wishing you a very warm welcome to our site..... Just been wondering about your chosen handle... Genghis Khan......... I just hope that your good lady, remembered to re-aquire the Phil citizenship before leaving for home, with her new shiny British passport... You have a nice time on your own :vhappy:, and before she is due back make sure that the pad is well "sanitized"..........
Thanks, Aromulus. I just have a bit of a fascination with Genghis, that's all. It's not a serious relationship... Anyway, he's not as much fun as he used to be... And I'll try and sanitize her iPad before she gets back. Dettol or Cilit Bang? Which one is best? Only one way to find out...
Hello Paul and a warm welcome here. Hope you'll decide to stay awhile. This is very open, honest and friendly forum. Between us all there some great information and viewpoints and experience. You're right about Bohol, it's a truly wonderful island. My MIL was born and raised there but we only ever visited one time. The trouble is there are so very many worthwhile places to see in Pinas and not enough time to see them all. Thanks for posting and hope you'll find this a worthwhile place to share and exchange your experience.
Thanks, Micawber. I've only been registered for a few hours, but it looks like a very useful and friendly forum - wish it had been around 6 or 7 years ago! Yes, I know there's another "big" forum that's along the same lines, but I never found it to be a comfortable place...
Yeah welcome my missus is in balamban cebu but fingers crossed not for much longer im in portugal using a cats wisker for ny net connection lol
Im trying to keep my sense of humour this may change soon as Portugal is being "fibre opticed" and the cables are being laid 20 meters from our house now that will be fast
Good luck with the fibre, Keith. We live about 3 miles from our exchange, and have been having to make do with a 3.5Mb connection for the past 3 years. Until a fibre cabinet was installed locally (about 300m away) and I moved over to that last month. At the moment, I'm downloading at 32Mb! It's just amazing - no more World Wide Wait! South Yorkshire is now more like South Korea...
It wasn't that long ago our village was upgraded to an eye-watering 6-8Mb. Compared to the previous connection it was indeed eye-watering and I very nearly cried with joy at the super-speed. To be truthful I can still remember enjoying very fast access when we lived in Yokohama 10 years ago. Can't recall how fast but wonderful. Just cannot even image 32Mb. As I said previously, before we get that kind of speed here I'll be in Pinas looking for a cat's whisker (big smiley grin)
In reality most web pages will not appear that much quicker as the sites delivering them are either throttled to share their upload bandwidth between many users or are just in awkward places like pretty much anything in the Phils is relative to here. The real benefits come when you are downloading files, be it a large piece of software or a large video file, depending on the site that is dishing up the file you may see a big difference in download times. For example in the office we have a couple of bonded lines giving us about 30Mb/s download speeds, every couple of months there is one particular site in the US from which I have to download a moderately large update to my toolset, the update is about 400MB. When this company makes the file available it still takes about 50 to 60 minutes to download simply because they don't have the upload bandwidth to support the number of people that simultaneously want this file. On the other hand I downloaded about 7GB of software from Microsoft today via one of their peer to peer API's (it's like their version of a torrent) and it took a total of about 20 to 30 minutes, but even Microsoft slows down when they have a big release that everyone wants. The big benefit of higher speeds is being able to do more things at once without them affecting each other, I get by pretty well at home now with Sky Broadband running at about 14MB pretty consistently. The Phils well it's a pain, the best I can get over there is Smart Bro and that is lucky if it ever hits 1Mb, makes it very hard for me to work or to connect to customers PC's in the UK for support and maintenance.
When I said I was downloading at 32Mb, it was a bit of willie-waving. It was the truth, but not the whole truth. The way I judge my speed is by looking at the figure that newsbin shows when I'm downloading from Giganews. On all the ADSL connections I've had in the past, that figure has always been rock-solid, varying by only 0.1 or 0.2Mb; since I moved to fibre, the figure has varied wildly - 32Mb is the highest I've reached, but it's more often 10-20Mb, and has even been as low as 1.xMb! I have no idea whether or not this is typical fibre behaviour, but it's no big of a deal (copyright S.Jobs) as the overall fibre experience has been excellent. Anyway, I'll put willie away now...
Hi Paul - sorry for the tardy welcome (I am working 25 hours a day at the moment) - errr.........anyway, welcome from my particular cat's whisker!! Al.:england:
I tend to speed check using BBMAX they aren't perfect but they give a pretty good indication of what your streaming speed could be. From practical viewpoint though (and for a wee bit of wille-waving ) I use this program to test in the real world I just noticed yesterday that the Premium edition of Visual Studio was available to us on MSDN now so decided to grab a copy to update my laptop from the Pro version to Premium. That image is saying 6 minutes remaining for nearly 2GB of data (1922 MB) and it arrived in that time, the transfer rate at that moment was 5.130 Mega BYTES per second so over 40 megabit per second which is pretty close to the theoretical limit on our bonded ADSL lines (not even fibre, just ordinary copper we have in the office) This was my personal speed test result tonight a few minutes ago admittedly it's early in the morning so not a lot of folk on the web but as I said I tend to get a pretty consistent result at home.
