limitations on Free Basics and the launch of an alternative with free full-content Facebook led seven of the FGD
respondents interviewed to switch from MPT to Telenor. Users themselves were not happy with a perceived
second-class Internet.
The results are given in greater detail in the resulting publication, Cihon, P. & Galpaya, H. (2017) Navigating the
walled garden: Free and subsidized data use in Myanmar available at http://lirneasia.net/wpcontent/uploads/2017/03/NavigatingTheWalledGarden_CihonGalpaya_2017.pdf and in Annex 3
3.3 Broadband QoSE testing
Servers used for the diagnostics were within core transit locations in Bangkok and Los Angeles. The Network
Diagnostic Tool (NDT) servers are outside of ISP networks, within data centers that have direct upstream transit
connectivity to the Internet (Tier 1 networks). This placement is intended to compare to actual user experience,
where more than one network is potentially involved in the delivery of content. This is different from isolating
only one component of the ecosystem as other testing infrastructures sometimes do, such as to the access
provider’s edge.
Detailed results are available in the report (Annex 4). However, a case in point is the often-misunderstood
metrics; for instance download speed and latency. Latency, or Round-Trip-Time (RTT), is the time taken for a
packet to reach a destination server and return to the client. It often affects the quality of certain services like
online gaming and streaming media, among others, and also contributes to the time taken for a webpage to load.
The lower the latency the better the overall performance. However, various factors can affect the download
speed even if latency is low and vice-versa. This was evident in our diagnostics (Figure X & Figure Y) where areas
with high download speeds did not necessarily measure up well in terms of latency.
The figures below illustrate the better performing states (colour coded in shades of green) where the higher
download speeds (Figure X) and lower latencies (Figure Y) were observed. The states colour coded in Red had
lower
download
speeds
(Figure
X)
and
higher
latencies
(Figure
Y)