Internet users in Hong Kong have a right to know that the broadband services offered in the SAR are not living up to their bold 'high-speed' Internet connection claims. Though their services are still in their respective infancies, people should be aware that their broadband service only applies to Web sites based within Hong Kong. Once you start venturing to other parts of Asia, Europe, and the United States, their service takes a nose-dive into a realm of unpredictability and drastically slower speed. Though there is a noticeable speed increase, it is nowhere near the speed that they claim to be operating at. To give you an idea, one service provider has a 1.5 megabyte service that, theoretically, is supposed to download a 3mb to 4mb file in roughly 12 seconds. If you have a broadband service and the site you are downloading from is, for instance, Microsoft's Update page, and it takes more then a minute to download any file on the page, then your service is ripping you off. When I posed this theory to the service provider, I was told that the Web sites I was visiting were generally 'busy' and that it was not their problem. Wrong answer. Microsoft could see the usage of their Web site double tomorrow and they still would not consider that 'busy'. My advice to anyone who is experiencing similar problems is to contact your respective companies and tell them that you want a complete refund. Or, if you are thinking about getting a broadband service that requires you to visit Web sites outside Hong Kong, wait a year. JONATHAN M. NESBITT Mid-Levels
