Bandwidth Woes

Clothes modding shops. Yeah, you could call darzees that. Thx to jaydee for that little gem.

The bandwidth situation in Pakistan is horrible. Ever since the first ISP (Digicom), the typical Pakistani business model has been hard at work; squeezing as much money out of customers and providing as little service as possible.

I think Digicom - the first paki ISP - opened up in around 1996, with CyberNet and a few others shortly after. CyberNet has almost consistently provided a decent service to this day (mainly due to the immense, seemingly unlimited resources of it's parent company).

Even these days, especially in Lahore, bandwidth costs are insane. As with everything else in Lahore, quality costs more than any sane person would be willing to pay.

I actually took the time out to figure out some costs associated with trying to send a large file (say, a movie) around the world.

I made an excel sheet with a few calculations, calculating the cost in Rupees per MB of different services. Here's an executive summary:

Cable
Worldcall 64k - Rs. 72 / MB
Worldcall 100k - Rs. 71 / MB

DSL
Multinet 128k - Rs. 108.51 / MB with a 4 GB cap (YGBSM)
Multinet 256k - Rs. 144.68 / MB with an 8 GB cap (YRGBSM)

If this is all beginning to look really shitty, you're beginning to understand the madness that is the ISP industry in this country.

Thank God, a few Karachi-only services reassure us that there is a city in this country which still has some sane people left.

CyberDSL 128k - Rs. 36.17 / MB with a 2 GB cap
CyberDSL 256k - Rs. 24.11 / MB with a 2 GB cap

MaxCom 256k - Rs. 18.08 / MB with a 1 GB cap
MaxCom 256k - Rs. 36.17 / MB with a 3 GB cap

For the poor paindos stuck in Lahore (a group which I'm increasingly assumed to be in), I have managed to find an alternative:

FedEx.

Yeah you heard me. FedEx charges around Rs. 2,000 for sending a light parcel from Lahore to the US. You could burn a 4 GB DVD, send it over through FedEx, and have it reach it's destination in around 4 days. That's an average throughput of around 100 Kbps (12.136 KB/s to be exact). That works out to be Rs. 61.73 per MB, a hell of a lot cheaper than Worldcall and Multinet!! If you're sneaky, you could even fit two DVDs (without the cover) into the envelope, and then you'd get around 200 Kbps throughput, that amounts to Rs. 20.58 per MB, which is just about competing with CyberDSL and Maxcom, and even blowing them away when it comes to their transfer caps.

Of course all this is inspired from RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers a.k.a TCP/IP over Pigeons). Who would have thought that 16 years later it'd really be useful to someone :D