One of my friend were complaining about his overlimitted internet Quota. He said that he must pay twice as his subsciption fee. He noticed that he didn’t use his internet bandwidth as much as it counted in the ISP. Finally, he decided to complaining his problem to the ISP, with those difficult prochedure.

Talking about Internet …..

In my opinion, customer in Indonesia always in the weak side …. need some proof ?

1. There is no legal agreement beetween the ISP with the customer, especially about the real througput (speed) that customer get when he/she subscribed with those ISP’s.

2. If you are using Quota-based subscribtion, there is no “clearly-stated-argument” that explain the amount of Byte he/she used. For example : 1 GB subscription means 1.000 Mega-Byte or 1.024 Mega-Byte.

3. The using of those Quota, is for Upload & Download, or just Download only ???

In the other side, the internet tariff in Indonesia is one of the most expensive in the asia, while the speed is slower than another country; based on the testimony of the Minister of Communications and Informatics based on :

1. The penetration of the internet is not high as another country in Asia. This related to the price per-GB usage of the data flow in the internet gateway in the other country….

2. Indonesia using Internet Gateway in Singapore, and it make more expensive (cause we have to pay to them )

But WTF !!! Those are the complain from the Goverment and Internet Gateway provider indonesia … and i don’t give a sh*t !!!! The point here is, i want to share, how to maintain, and manage your internet bandwidth. Not only for your own purpose, but it’s also useful for you to control the ISP services (Availability of the connection, Speed / Throughput, Counter of the Quota, etc.)

First of all i would like to share the easiest way to check the availability of your connection, if you can’t use your browser (if another setting is normal). You can trace the connection problem by using ping command.

1. Open Start -> Run -> write : cmd [enter]

2. In the command prompt write : ipconfig [enter]

3. You’ll see your Connection-specific DNS Suffix, IP Number, Subnet Mask, and Default Gateway

4. Try to ping to your ISP server using command : ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (x means the number of your gateway. e.g. 192.169.0.1).

So the command will be : ping 192.168.0.1 .

If there is reply from the server, then you don’t have problem to connect with your ISP server. Try the next step …

5. Try to ping website of your ISP, or another website that located in Indonesia (e.g. www.telkom.net), using command : ping www.telkom.net . if there is reply from the server, then you don’t have connection in local connection (around Indonesia). try the next step ….

6. Try to ping website in the overseas (e.g. www.google.com), using command : ping www.google.com . if you don’t have the reply from the server, the problem must be come from the internet gateway (can be from IIX, or the internet gateway connected to the ISP -Telkom, Indosat, XL)

Second, how to monitor the usage of the quota of your internet usage ?

You can download a free software (freeware), called NetMeter here …..

In this software, you can see the throughput (kB/s) when downloading, and the uploading speed. You also can monitor your usage of your Internet quota, by monitoring the uploaded and downloaded data in kB (kilo-Byte), and the usage statistic per-day, per-week, and per-month. And this software can summarize the total usage per-Month. It runs as a background application, and configurable to use as an automatically start-up program, always on top, and you can configure the transparency of the software so you can monitor it all the time.