Ok...lets be straight here. First of all, I work with KIDANET as a client so anything I write here should be suspect. There's no way that I can be expected to be impartial when reviewing or commenting on Fiji's Internet service providers, after all. I'll always skew things in the direction of KIDANET. Right? Right. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, lets move on.
There have been a number of informative comparisons of Fiji's ISPs written since Unwired Fiji first came in and offered an alternative to the incumbent, Connect. Most of these comparisons are based on up/down speeds, bandwidth limits, installation costs, etc...those are important data points when making an informed decision but I'm still a HUGE believer that at the end of the day, network performance is the only thing that ultimately matters. That's correct. In Fiji, all that matters is performance and I haven't seen any service that performs as well or as consistently as KIDANET does.
During the past month or two, I've been relying heavily on my connection to keep abreast of the Philadelphia Phillies, my hometown major league baseball team. This season, I subscribed to MLB.TV, the league's online service offering LIVE audio and video feeds of games and a host of other high-bandwidth applications to keep me connected to my team. For the first time in six years, I can safely say that I have actually felt connected to the Phils, too. It's also just my luck that as I write this, the Phillies are on the verge of winning the World Series. One more game, baby...
But I digress...lets talk about our network service options in Fiji.
I am watching LIVE baseball games streamed full screen over my 512k home KIDANET connection. Is it perfect? No...at 512k, the 400k stream I'm watching is probably the minimum speed for which it becomes acceptable. For the World Series which began last week, however, I asked KIDANET to upgrade me to a 1MB connection. As Mark Twain might write, the difference for me is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
With a 1MB connection in Fiji, I'm able to take advantage of the 800k stream on MLB.TV. The quality seems absolutely that of SKY Fiji, if not better. Every now and then, the screen might get pixelated for a moment but it's usually because of some kind of hiccup on my local network as opposed to something on the KIDANET link. Now the good part...I can keep this bandwidth-hogging connection going for four hours, non-stop. I'm sure I could keep it going longer than that if need be. I've downloaded 8GB files uninterrupted. Until I spoke to other ISP users, I didn't know how bad they had it.
To those outside of Fiji, you may not understand why continuous connectivity is notable but for those in Fiji (and possibly elsewhere in the Pacific), you probably do. For if there is one complaint I most often hear from Internet users in Fiji, it's the complaint about dropped connections, interrupted downloads, voice calls cut off, etc...
Up until recently, I did run into some issues with my home KIDANET link, always stemming from the use of BitTorrent. The problems would result in my link freezing up on me and the only thing I could do was ask one the KIDANET engineers to reset my connection. The solution (trading out my old network IDU) was given to me over a year ago but I was too lazy to deal with it until a few weeks back as well. Now it's perfect.
I absolutely am not intending for this post to be anti-Connect or anti-Unwired. If anything, I'm just espousing my own satisfaction with an Internet connection that, although not the cheapest in town, seems to be the most reliable.
Outside of this reliability, I see very little difference between Fiji's ISPs now anyways. Certainly none of them offer incredibly memorable and timely customer service. Perhaps my KIDANET support issues are notable only because they're so infrequent. The only differentiator to the service then is SPEED. Price is simply not relevant to me and I would wager that for most people who actually depend a great deal on the Internet, price may not be the main driver. That written, I won't ignore the fact that for many people, it is. Rest assured, a year or two from now, those same people will be seeking the best connection they can find, not necessarily the cheapest. Quality is what matters.
But what about Connect and what about Unwired?
I do not have accounts with either of these companies any longer but I continuously talk to plenty of people that do. During the past few months, I've been actively seeking out experiences with those providers and the results haven't been too pretty. I was over at a friend's house last week who uses a non-KIDANET service and I couldn't believe the quality of the connection. He was also on a 512k link and we couldn't get the MLB video stream to play at all, even poorly. That, in itself, doesn't mean very much. His stories of dropped connections, however, does. His neighbor was there...same service connection...same problems. There is a pattern here.
A 512k link offered by a Fijian ISP should guarantee a 512k connection back to that ISP. If I ever feel my KIDANET connection is sluggish, I use their bandwidth speed test to ensure my link is what I'm paying it to be. It always is. This would tend to point to the problem being outside of KIDANET's immediate network. I'll still call in to query whether there's a problem but at least I know it's not with my own link. I don't intend to oversimplify the technology here either...there are many factors which dictate how fast an Internet connection is.
From my perspective, KIDANET has simply built a more efficient network compared to the other providers out there. Although it's only available in the Suva-Nausori corridor now, I think other parts of the country will start to get their own taste at some point soon. We can only hope that two things will happen then; one, that more people will have access to reliable Internet services and two, that the competing ISPs will start to improve the efficiency of their own networks since that's all that matters.
I'd be keen to see any comments here voicing love for non-KIDANET connections. Feel free to tell your own stories but if you do, please use your real names or fess up to the fact that you may be as unbiased as I am.
Lastly, I dread having to de-evolve back to a 512k link again with KIDANET. I love the 1MB too much. If I worked from home, I could justify the expense but alas, I cannot. Damnit.
