The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has released Q1 of 2011 Broadband analysis report on the quality of fixed Broadband retail services offered by licensed Internet Services Providers (ISPs) in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
“Via this regular report TRA aim at providing consumers with qualitative data relating to the observed quality of service provided by ISPs to allow consumers to understand what performance is likely to be expected from each ISP,” TRA’s Technical and Operations Director Mohammed Mahmood said while commenting on the report.
“TRA will continue its campaign to publish quality of services reports on quarterly basis; during January all monitored services have been upgraded to 2 Mb/s as before only WiMax operators were on 2Mb/s, in order to allow consumers to more easily compare results. Due to the modification no measurement was reported during the month of January the report covers measurements of fixed Broadband services from Internet Service Providers,” he added.
There were two major events during the first Quarter of 2011; Batelco suffered a network incident that affected retail and wholesale Broadband services during February. The Falcon submarine cable supporting one way to access the global internet from the Kingdom was also disrupted during the last week of March. Both incidents did cause disturbances in the internet services such as lower speed browsing experience for end users.
The following chart present the observed average TCP download speed based on measurements taken every hour for each audited service during the period of Q1 2011, from 00:00:00 on the 1 February 2011 to 24:00:00 on the 31 March 2011.
For each ISP, one set of measurements is taken each hour, 24 hours a day. In this report, results for a given hour are then averaged to determine the average performance in that hour over the two month period. i.e. all results recorded between 8:00 and 9:00 for an ISP are averaged and reported as one observation on the graph that provide the average performance of this specific time period over a two month period.
This method has the advantage that it can show trends over an audited period as well as show variations during a 24h period.
Other parameters including TCP Upload, HTTP Cache and Non Cache, Round Trip Delay and DNS resolution time are available in the full report that can be viewed on TRA website.