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Procedia Computer Science 107 (2017) 64 – 69

International Congress of Information and Communication Technology (ICICT 2017)

Measuring Broadband Internet Performance in Nepal: A

Comparative Study
Nabin Kumar Karn a, *, Zhang Honglia, Muhammad Shafiqa
a
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
* Corresponding author: karnnabin@hit.edu.cn Tel.: +86-451-86413309-

Abstract

Broadband Internet performance either Fixed or Wireless has not been studied in details from the view of customer; though,
broadband internet savors wide penetration in Nepal. Till now to the best of our knowledge that no independent analysis has been
carry out that expose the end-user's experience in Nepal. That famine of knowledge is upsetting as benchmarking broadband
internet performance that is essentially crucial for consumers of Nepal due to its large souk. To fill that empty, we accomplished
a preliminary investigation of both broadband (fixed landlines and fixed wireless) internet links in Nepal throughout host-based
using the speedtest.net and speedof.me. Accuracy of host-based is not as high as router-based due to several factors, although it
gives the glimpse of broadband performance. Our findings indicating that the customers in Nepal are not reaching proclaimed
speeds; wireless broadband internet convinces proclaimed performance tied up better than wired broadband internet in most of
cases. Often high latencies play significant performance bottlenecks to destination. Rich peering between different ISPs and
investing in local server infrastructure will create a noteworthy difference in getting better experience of internet for consumers
in Nepal.

Keywords: Broadband Performance; Broadband measurement; Nepal; policy; Host based

1. Introduction

Modern era is the age of Internet, and it is an essential part of human life. Broadband Internet access and adoption
is crucial to seizing the full benefits of the information society and Nepal can't be exceptional. Broadband internet
connectivity in Nepal is booming, although, the country's broadband internet performance data are available in
pocket size.
Previously some studies1,2 have been conducted to measure the fixed and wireless broadband internet
performance in developed countries (i.e. UK, USA) as well as also in developing country ( i.e.in South Africa) to
demonstrate the contrast and seen some utter difference in connectivity between developed regions and developing
country. In that research, number of ISPs providing either fixed or wireless do not achieve advertised rates which

1877-0509 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 7th International Congress of Information and Communication Technology
doi:10.1016/j.procs.2017.03.057
 Nabin Kumar Karn et al. / Procedia Computer Science 107 (2017) 64 – 69 65

are the bitter truth of developing countries. In our study, our motive is to re-investigate some of the question in
context of broadband provider in Nepal which is least developing country.
Presently, in Nepal, several bodies are there like regulatory bodies, Internet Service Provider association,
broadband users, but none of any one organization has access to do assessment of broadband networks quality from
the view of end users. Inform the users about value of money3, better data is required; moreover, if the performance
does not meet up standards helps to decline the broadband usage 4,5 appearing in and an associated to the senility of
the nation's development indicators6. Our primary goal is to do the assessment broadband internet quality or
connectivity in Nepal. The data we collected could support better information to make suitable policy-making and
investment in this region7,8,9, besides that also provide better connection picture which was not explored before. We
deal with the following questions in this paper:
• Do the broadband users in Nepal either fixed or wireless subscribers achieves ISPs advertise speeds ?
• How is the performance consistency that the end users experience over time?
•Evaluation of the contributions of the factors such as latency, DNS caching to the end-to-end performance ?
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we talk about our study background and introduce metrics and
techniques applied for evaluating broadband Internet performance. We introduce our method to evaluate broadband
internet performance contrasting with alternative techniques. Section 3 presents the outcomes of our ongoing swot
work endeavouring to benchmark Internet Service Providers across Nepal. Discusses and conclusion of our
experiments are presented in section 4.

2. Background and Technique

In this chapter, we present a short background about Internet access in Nepal and measurement in details.

2.1 Broadband in Nepal

Some facts that show the present position of Internet access in Nepal 10 is shown in table 1. In concise, Nepal's
broadband Internet is on the fast track. Broadband technology and higher data rates, both we are considered for
broadband. In Nepal, Internet users are around 14 million with penetration rate of 52%. Penetration rate to fixed
broadband internet access in Nepal go on to increase steadily from a very tiny base. There are around 30 Internet
Service Providers and penetration increased from 0.8 to 0.9 during 2012 to 2014 and 1.2% in 2016. It is predicted
that the growth of fixed broadband penetration will reach at least 3.0% by 2021 from the current penetration of
1.2 %. Mobile broadband has seen continues and strongly expand from a relatively little base. Access to mobile
broadband has amplified from 17% to 21% from 2014 to 2015 and 25% in 2016 11. Several ways to get broadband
which includes fixed line via Asynchronous Digital Subscriber line(ADSL), 3G USB modem,(EVDO), Cable
modem, WiMAX(IEEE 802.16e), and FTTH(Fiber to the Home) which put into operation recently 10. Fig.1 shows
penetration rate of the various broadband internet providing technologies. According to Nepal Telecommunication
Authority (NTA) which releases the monthly MIS report, 55.15 % of internet market share is hold by NDCL 10.
Similarly 42.48% by Ncell, 0.46 % by UTL, 0.76 % by STPL and rest is shared among other ISPs. Service plan
deployment rates, average pay and cost of broadband in Nepal are shows in Table 2.
Unfortunately, in Nepal, evolution of Internet started before the establishing the proper regulatory body. In
Nepal, the internet launched in 1993 but the first Telecommunication acts commenced in 1997. Since then several
telecommunications and broadband practiced and the recent broad- band policy has come into effect from 2014 12.
However, there has been no provision to scrutinize and regulate the quality of broadband. We believe that this study
will assist the authorities to draw up new policies for monitoring and regulating ISPs broadband performance.

Table 1. Fast Internet Facts About nepal10 Table 2. Tariff and Service plan rate of ISP's
66 Nabin Kumar Karn et al. / Procedia Computer Science 107 (2017) 64 – 69

Fig.1. Different technology penetration rate to access broadband internet in Nepal.

2.2 Measurement Technique and Approaches

We seek to yardstick the broadband ISPs in Nepal directly from end user's home gateway. In order to measure
broadband performance, several methods and techniques are used. Measurement doing at the place of end user's end
is one method. In this type, while the users at end machine ask to download a specific application 13, at same time
running web applications measure speed tests for upload and download throughput along with latency. Speedtest.net
by Ookla14 is one prominent web application. Content Distribution Services(CDN) like Akamai also performing host
based speed tests. Host based measurements are affected by certain limitation which include factors such as the
home network environment like home wireless network, interference from multiple users accessing the same uplink,
and limitations of the end host. This type of measurements characterize snaps of the that network at the particular
time when the measurement was taken and depends on execution which done by users 15.
Another measurements technique that distinguishes from host based is measures directly from home gateway
router. A router is equipped with special firmware in router based measurement is distributed among users. Users
are posed either make it default router or substitute their default router with the custom router. The benefit of router
based measurement is that the measurements is possible without any interference from a user and gets continuous
measurements because the router is always on and connected. Tests doing by this method generate cleaner and more
precise results because home factors that influence measurements are elucidate 16. Since the router kit are costly and
hard to purchase and install which is main hindrance of router based measurements in least developing countries like
Nepal. For the purposes of this study we selected two different web application speedtest.net and speedof.me.

2.3 Deployment Scenario

For this paper reports, we presented the data collected between June 2016 and Sept. 2016 in Nepal and still
ongoing our study and data collection work. We collected the data using only host based and in future we will do
router based measurements to measure broadband internet performance of fixed line and mobile connectivity using
an open source measurement platform which is suitable for the South Asian environment. We hired the users where
required using the local website, local e-mail lists, word of mouth, our own local contact network and organization,
 Nabin Kumar Karn et al. / Procedia Computer Science 107 (2017) 64 – 69 67

social media sites such as Facebook.com, Twitter.com and messaging app like whatsapp. We were also aware about
collecting the data from different part of country as well as from different providers. We mainly focus in this paper
on how we have adapted these tools to operate in a developing country, where constraints are different. We
conducted the subsequent experiments: upload and download throughput, latency, jitter, DNS resolution time. To
measure latency, we carried out latency ping test to Measurement Lab servers around the world. We collected
measurements are shown in table 3.

3. Results

We now summarize the outcomes of our experiment. First we explore both fixed and wireless broadband internet
performance of ISPs, whether they reach the ranks which they advertised to customers. After that, we investigate the
uniformity of the performance and the factors which affects performance, such as latency. Lastly, we study scope of
various optimizations technique that could improve end-to-end performance such as DNS caching.

3.1 What about throughput matching according to advertised rates?

First, we investigate the throughput values that we measured using host based throughput measurements either
matched with advertised rate by ISPs to customers. We use normalized throughput for this purpose and shown in
fig.2. The majority ISPs not pass to achieve the advertised performance rate that can be seen clearly. As shown by
whisker in plot, throughput measurement went over advertised rates in some rare case.

3.2 Measurements of Latency

We also examine latencies distribution between measurement servers which is nearby to our vantage points. We
also investigated not only the last-mile latencies of each Internet service provider's but also the end-to-end latencies
around the world to different destinations. Latencies distributions are shown in figure 3. Despite the latencies
generally shows reasonably low variance, there are significant outliers docile latencies that certainly deserve further
investigation because almost an order of scale higher than the norm. Fig.3 shows the latency besides local server in
Kathmandu to different servers that are placed around the world. Latencies with geographic region do not associate
with geographic distance as we saw in fig 3. For example, geographical distance to New Delhi from Kathmandu is
only around 1000 Kilometres away where as latency is around 300 ms. On the other hand the distance to London is
6-7 times far away in compare to New Delhi but latency to London is about 200 ms. All the traffic to India is route
via Singapore exchange point due to no direct routes to ISPs of India, similar to study done by 1.

Table 3. Summary of Measurements

68 Nabin Kumar Karn et al. / Procedia Computer Science 107 (2017) 64 – 69

Websurfer Wlink bisu Mercantile

Fig.2 ISP's Throughput normalized by rate advertised according Fig.3 Latencies measurement from Kathmandu to around the world
to service plan (Value of 1 means advertised rate meets the attained
Throughput). Results show most of the ISPs fall well below the
advertised rates.

3.3 What other factors affect performance?

Now, we investigate how do the factors like DNS caching at local server and time of day affect impact to end-to-
end performance which user experience. DNS caching queries at local resolver can extensively reduced the time to
resolve the DNS queries by an order of magnitude in many cases that we found. Diurnal congestion patterns are
well-provisioned in internal to Nepal ,however that overcrowding to International destinations continue striking.
DNS caching- To measure the effect of local DNS caching, we issued two queries for the same DNS name in
sequence to the Internet service provider's local resolver assuming that the one query will characterize the
consequence of an uncached query and other query will provide from the local caching resolver of ISP's. Fig.4
shows the result of DNS caching on broadband internet Performance for cached and uncached queries.
Time-of Day Effects- Fig. 5 shows how the latencies fluctuation depends on the time of day. Latency is increases
as well as more inconsistent during peak hours that we can see in the results. Latency values fluctuate to both server,
but variation is significantly less to local server than International location's server.
Effect of Jitter- Jitter measures the unevenness within latency measurements and its values for different
broadband ISPs in Nepal are shown in Fig.6. Real time applications such as gaming, VOIP and video conferencing
are suffering from high Jitter effects. ISPs having fixed wireless showing higher values with greater variations while
ISPs having Wires showing low values.

NDCL C NDCL NC Websurfer C Websurfer NC Wlink C Wlink NC Subisu C Subisu NC Mercantile N Mercantile NC

caching DNS(C) versus Non Caching DNS (NC)

Fig. 4 DNS caching effects on DNS query resolution time

4. Discussion and Conclusion

This paper provides a comparative investigation on broadband Internet performance in Nepal. Investigational results
are summarized as, (1) advertised rates not achieving by ISPs; (2) Latency and other factors have significant effects;
 Nabin Kumar Karn et al. / Procedia Computer Science 107 (2017) 64 – 69 69

NDCL Websurfer Wlink Subisu Mercantile

Fig 5: Local hour of the day to the Server at GOOGLE DNS

mean latency values along with measurement server at Fig. 6 Broadband ISP's Jitter Values of Nepal
Kathmandu

(3) Due to poor peering by ISP in a region generates oblique directions; and (4) local caching and pre-fetching
which are simple optimizations can extensively advance the DNS response time. The above results summarize the
condition of broadband internet in Nepal and generate a number of observations to commendation for broadband
internet access networks in Nepal, although, we need to perform router based measurement to reach in a concrete
planning for future and we are trying to do that.

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