Pakistan Reroutes Youtube Traffic

It’s hard to say how they did this but Pakistan Telecom rerouted most of the traffic going to youtube’s website to some other page. Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) released a notice to ban access to Youtube.com. PTA made route changes in BGP protocol  which were updated in other internet databases.

g729 – A success story

Its almost a month now that I am using this new desi cable net service. So far it is good. After an initial tests I was really happy to see that there was no port blocking like City Cable Network in this service. 

I was able to connect to FWD instantly. However, my cheers were broken down when I found that the remote party couldn’t hear my voice. First I thought that this cable internet provider is blocking RTP ports or something like that.

However a little investigation revealed the problem is with the internet bandwidth. When I ran a series of speed tests, I got shocking results. My downlink was fluctuating between 512 to 256 kbps while the uplink was just 20-30 kbps which makes VoIP impossible. Did I say impossible? Make it possible. After hunting for the best compression codec I found g729. It just requires 13kbps which was what I needed. The other codec required more than 60kbps which caused 70% packet loss for outbound VoIP traffic. I am posting testmyvoip.net results for you to have a better picture. Thanks for g729. It simply rules and thanks for FWD for supporting G729. Now I can make and receive SIP calls.

I have asked my service provider to solve the problem because less than 3KB upload speed doesn’t make sense. It is even less than 56kbps dialup which offers 33kbps upload. I have told my cable internet service provider  that the problem is either because they have purchased Aysmetric bandwidth or they have purchased uplink and downlink bandwidth separately. Lastly, bandwidth cap/rate limit on SQUID could be the reason. Whatever the case be, I am a subscriber paying for the service and I want the problem fixed . Sorry if it sounds harsh.