April, 2010 | Elyas Thinks...

Archive | April, 2010

SEA-ME-WE 4 Damaged…

Elyas Kashfi / April 27, 2010 / Bahrain, Technology / Permalink

The Middle East is known for many things, just a few off the top of my head: wars, oil, riches and heat. I guess I should now add one more to the list, the most disconnected region!

Apparently one of the most important cable in the region, SEA-ME-WE 4 that accounts for around 89% of traffic, suffered a shunt fault somewhere around Italy. This happened around the 15th of April. The Internet around here has been slow as hell (depending on the ISP… and the time of the day), packets are getting lost like a primitive post office.

The repair was supposed to be around the 25th, and to be complete by today (27th), unfortunately it seems like conditions aren’t right (arr matey the seas are treacherous!!), and it seems the repair window has been extended until Friday the 30th…

ISPs around here are rerouting traffic or sending them over different cables. I see that Batelco are starting to use FLAG a bit more, and sending TATA traffic the other way across the globe: India>Singapore>Japan>US>Europe. Menatelecom (my new ISP) unfortunately seems to be routing around 89% of traffic through this damaged route (TATA is part of the SEA-ME-WE 4 group) according to Robtex.

I’ve lost count of major disruptions to the Internet in the Middle East, the worst being in 2008. Guess its time to relax and read some books.

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Menatelecom: Customers + 1

Elyas Kashfi / April 15, 2010 / Bahrain, Technology / Permalink

After many years, ever since Batelco introduced ADSL at what were exorbitant rates, I have decided to jump ship and join the WiMax crowd.

Don’t get me wrong, I love DSL, but unfortunately the only way I am getting a stable fast connection is going through the airwaves. For about a couple of years I have been suffering with terrible line problems that manifested suddenly out of the blue. It took the tech several days of almost living in my home to figure out the problem. My ADSL+router combo box literally got burnt due to all the ons and offs (back then Linksys didn’t have a nice power switch), of course they blamed it on the router… But a few days later they found something wrong at the exchange where my line goes in… Supposedly they fixed the problem, but with a condition: I may never see over 1Mbps due to the distance to the exchange. A few weeks ago, I managed to get 2Mbps DSL, stable. Yesterday, I started hearing crackling sounds in my line, which resulted in my modem losing sync around every half hour.

A call to Batelco’s helpdesk is useless, they enjoy blaming the customer, they can do that when customers are allowed to equip their own equipment. They told me something is wrong with the router, or the cable between the router and socket. The tech on the phone even made a mocking comment on the phone! I wonder if it was recorded?

Today morning I wake up, my router had been off during the night, at this point I was hoping for a miracle. Who knows maybe the cable fairies spread some magic dust around!? Before plugging in I picked up the phone to check for static, and guess what, it was worse than ever! A call to someone sounded like talking over a WW2 era walkie talkie.

I synced low at this stage, around 643Kbps out of my line’s 2048Kbps. Few hours later complete inactivity. Pick up phone, nothing, no dial tone just silence. Call the phone, it rings to the caller, but the phones were not ringing. Time for another call to the line fault center… By 2pm no engineer had arrived, by 2:30pm a call telling us that they will only come around on Saturday (2 days from today!!!). So until then we are without phone, people calling us will probably think we are dead or left the country if it weren’t for our mobiles!

3:30pm, I head over to KFH Automall, the closest Menatelecom branch. The lady was kind and informative, she was even honest about me not getting 2Mbps due to coverage. So I decided to get the 2Mbps package, but with the downside that I will be using the allocated transfer (12GB) at 1Mbps, better than nothing! By 4:15pm I am out smiling with my red bag, I was told it would take around 4 hours to activate. I spent almost 24 hours disconnected, 4 hours won’t hurt.

4:30pm I am back home, and start wiring the stuff. All except connecting the plug to the power, I got 3.5 hours left for that anyways. 5pm, what the heck if its active its active, if not then its not, plugged in the power. Green lights starting blinking like an alien ship. Fire up the browser, and voila it works!! What’s best, I am currently getting enough coverage allowing me to use the full 2Mbps I subscribed to!

Sunday morning Batelco will lose the BD25-30/monthly they used to get (DSL fees paid for them over the years probably amount to thousands and thousands of Dinars!!)… I pay just a wee bit more at Menatelecom (service charge is the same, but WiMax modem on lease), get the full advertised speed sometimes more (Batelco provided my with 2Mbps on a best effort basis, my download speeds never went over 1.5Mbps).

This is the first day on Mena, it is working great so far, I hope it stays this way, if not, then I might be jinxed by the Internet curse… I can’t wait to see the Batelco guys on Saturday, telling me the Internet is now working (or not)!

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Review: cFosSpeed Traffic Shaper

Elyas Kashfi / April 8, 2010 / Review, Software / Permalink

Today in my networking class we were discussing about the different protocols used, congestion was mentioned at some point in class and then it hit me: I never ever spoke about a nifty program I use called cFosSpeed! Never told anyone about it, never mentioned it when people suffer slow browsing speeds while trying to download stuff!

As a result I have decided to write this review about a little program called cFosSpeed. It has been around for several years, I think I have been using it for possibly 5+ years, when it first came out.

cFosSpeed is a traffic shaping software for Windows, it works on both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows. It installs a driver that you can see on your network adapter's properties. By default it comes configured with options that are suited for most people, but of course it can be customized easily by tweaking settings in the GUI or editing a couple of files.

So what does it do exactly? Imagine this situation: you are downloading something using Bittorrent. Obviously you want to download at max speed. However, can you browse sites properly with BT eating up your line? Pages timeout, never load or you just give up and pause the download for your browsing session… cFosSpeed manages the traffic for you by shaping it much like what your ISP might do, set priorities to different types of traffic from low (such as P2P) to high (media streaming).

The result is better traffic management, and since it controls both upload and download queues you technically do not have to set limits to software that has such an option (like P2P). Upon installation your browser pops up to the page where one of the links is for you to test it for yourself!

cFosSpeed works by sending ping packets to some point in the path between your computer and their website (this can be configured to another site). However the TTL is set low, so it will never reach its destination but somewhere in between. In my case it hits the router/device just after my ISP's gateway after my home network (hop 3 in trace routes). This as well can be configured if for example, your ISP sets low priorities to pings at certain points, or if cFosSpeed messes up differentiating your local network to the external network.

Well that is more or less the idea of cFosSpeed, some pictures might explain the above a bit better.

Below is one of the many skins that come with cFosSpeed. This is my favorite, called Liquid Crystal. It shows the number of connections (77), download speed (28.7k) and upload speed (9.8k) along with the latency to the hop I mentioned above.

Below are the connections currently established. I blanked out the source and destination IP addresses. As you can see it shows the program that is currently using the connection, layer 7 (application layer) detection, data transferred, connection speed and most importantly what class the traffic is categorized. As you can see utorrent.exe has been set to lower while chrome.exe (Google Chrome) has been set to the highest priority.

cFosSpeed does a good job at detecting your network interfaces. As I only have one link that takes me to the outside world, I have my wireless interface only being shaped.

Some basic protocols are defined below along with a slider to control the priority of each. Basic rule is to have as little as possible protocols on high otherwise it is simply useless to shape traffic. I decided to increase HTTP only to maximum priority as shown below.

Here's the priority based on programs instead of just protocol. cFosSpeed prioritizes protocols first and then programs. This is good, a low priority program has data set low but basics such as resolving domains higher.

There are many other options inside, along with extra features. As you can see from the menus above, there is a section to control your Internet budget (if your connection has transfer metered with overages for example) and another section with traffic analysis and statistics.

cFosSpeed is actually pretty cheap for what you get. It costs only $19.90 (currency can be changed), sometimes they have offers but you will need to check frequently (its already cheap as it is!). Compared to other traffic shapers or limiters cFosSpeed probably has the best features, simple install and forget process and the lowest price.

You may check the cFos site here for more details and a better explanation of what it does. Click on one of the little flags at the top to switch to your language of choice.

Update 1: I just went through my email and found the email with my licence key, here is the timestamp: Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:54:18 +0200. Over 5 years !