ADSL speeds in Pattaya

[torrenova 649]

I've recently moved and need to get ADSL again after TOT finally confirmed they cannot port my line over from the condo to the new house. So, I'm keen to get the best deal currently available.

 

I was on TOT ADSL 512/256 for Bt700 per month but was going to go to the 1024/256 for Bt1000 per month but whilst that is fine for regualr stuff, downloading things gets a big laborious. Of course I am not expecting 10mb but what other options are there which I can get on the current TOT line ? Actual speed versus cost is important as I now need to download more stuff.

 

Is it better with a different telephone provider to TOT ?

 

Thanks

[papillon 695]

It would be nice to see a good thread on internet provision.

 

I see that Skygod uses a GPRS sim card and cellphone.

 

Gary uses Ipstar satelite.

 

Torenova had ADSL.

 

Can you get internet on cable or not? If so what speed? How much? Name of provider?

[torrenova 649]

I know you can't get it through Sophon but that is not surprising as most of the time they cannot get their telly down the pipe either !

[papillon 695]

Is Sophon the only cable tv provider in Pattaya?

[jacko 8,866]

Is Sophon the only cable tv provider in Pattaya?

No, there is Banglamung Cable.... it's crap and unreliable.

 

I see Sophon have just started advertising a new cable service that will include telephone and internet. Perhaps a matter of 'watch this space'.

Edited August 14, 2007 by jacko

[Eneukman 1]

No, there is Banglamung Cable.... it's crap and unreliable.

 

I see Sophon have just started advertising a new cable service that will include telephone and internet. Perhaps a matter of 'watch this space'.

 

I don't think I'll be rushing to sign up until they got all the gremlins sorted. Give them a few years and they might get it right eventually.

 

As for ADSL, TOT is crap. TT&T are supposed to be more reliable.

 

Alan

[kolobos 0]

My only advice is go with TT&T, stay clear of TOT.

[Eneukman 1]

My only advice is go with TT&T, stay clear of TOT.

 

Why is that almost everybody says that? If the line wasn't in my landlord's name, I'd tell TOT to stick their service where the Sun don't shine!

 

Alan

[jackcorbett 2]

Both TOT and TT&T are crap in my book. We have a special setup here at the condo building using TOT. What it amounts to is a special deal at a special price for all sixty units. But we are hooked into a line that is shared by a couple of businesses or whatever. The good news is it's rated at 1024 kps download. The bad news is one is often lucky to get 10 percent of that. On a good day one can. Good news it only costs around 150 baht a month.

 

So I went with a line from TT&T rated at 256 kps download and 128 upload. No lengthy wait like I've heard there is with TOT. But setup costs around 8000 baht and that includes the modem. Monthly cost is nearly 1200 baht. In a make believe world the old TOT setup most people in this building get at 1024 kps download is four times faster than my new and much more expensive TT&T setup. But in the real world on average I'm getting at least 4 times faster speeds with TT&T.

 

Lately in the mornings especially the new, much more expensive TT&T setup will often shoot craps. So I bypass the modem and put my hub going to all my computers direct into the wall plug going into the TOT line shared by all the other condo owners here. Lately it's worked much more reliably than the TT&T setup. A couple of hours later I'll run my wires back through the modem that's hooked into the TTNT connection.

 

Yesterday and probably the day before everyone in this condo building had to do without Internet service. However, yesterday my connection was just fine through TTNT. But this morning I couldn't get online with either TTNT or TOT. A phone call to TTNT resulted in my giving them my cell phone number as my land line through TTNT was also out of action. Two or three hours later I got a call from TTNT that someone had stolen their cables throughout Pattaya. Service would be available by this evening or sometime tomorrow. But by late afternoon I learned that our entire building had its service back through TOT. I went upstairs and sure enough, I had service again. We have an electrician named Thor working for our condo building. Later on when I saw him he told me I should have service again with TTNT. I went upstairs to check. No Internet service.but this time the phone was working.

 

So there you have it. In my opinion choosing between TOT and TTNT is like deciding between two choices, these being if you are in a large tub up to your neck in shit and somebody threw a bucket of snot at your face, would you duck?

[windsors420 1]

Beautiful analogy JackCorbett. My coffee doen't look good right now.

[torrenova 649]

Had TOT 512/256 in View talay 2 for over 2 years and no problems. In the beginning the speed wasn't up to the sales pitch but after about 3-6 months, it was fine. The last 12 months were really great and you could leave it on for days and it would not fall over.

 

In that respect, I could not fault TOT at all.

 

What is this I hear about JI-net 2048/???? for about Bt1000 per month ?

[Eneukman 1]

Had TOT 512/256 in View talay 2 for over 2 years and no problems. In the beginning the speed wasn't up to the sales pitch but after about 3-6 months, it was fine. The last 12 months were really great and you could leave it on for days and it would not fall over.

 

In that respect, I could not fault TOT at all.

 

What is this I hear about JI-net 2048/???? for about Bt1000 per month ?

 

My experience with TOT is the exact opposite. You would think that there would be no difference between buildings A & B.

 

I have had to telephone TOT a number of times over the last few months and the service has been down for several hours on a number of times. I tend not to leave my modem switched on but even in the short time it has been on today, just over 3 hours, I have had to reboot it once already.

 

TOT sent engineers to try and find out why I was having problems and the useless tossers blamed my fire wall. 2 minutes after they left, the service failed again and it took an hour before I could get through. The engineers came back just before 5.00 pm and then decided that there was a problem in Bangkok!

 

The whole of 2A had no telephone service from TOT for 21 hours earlier this month, and then when it did come back on, it failed again after a mere 3 hours!

 

Some time ago, I was getting close to the advertised speeds though when the service was intalled I was doing well to get half that. I am paying for a 512/256 connection but just now I am getting 344/191. Not brilliant!

 

Alan

Edited August 15, 2007 by Eneukman

[jackcorbett 2]

Okay guys....here's the bottom line. Here in Thailand there is no accountability. That is, say you are without internet service for several days in a row. Think either TT&T or Tot will credit your bill? No way. Complain about doing without service and see where it gets you. No one lose their job because they failed to give good customer support. Now, it's two days without service from TT&T, I do have the el cheapo connection with ToT but not the one I am paying 1200 baht a month for. Last night showed I was connected. But I could not do squat. I rebooted everything. Even did the ipconfig/release, then the ipconfig/renew at the MS dos prompt to reset the ip address from TOT to TT&T and it reset the ip address to what it should be. But no internet at my high priced connection. Called again today and finally a techie called me and walked me through a procedure to get the modem up and running again. He want through the same procedure twice. But I had a critical appointment at 4 a.m. Had my gf notify the people I had to meet that I was on the phone with a techie to get my internet running. Well.......Still didn't work so he said he would call me back in 20 minutes. I was telling him I was already late for my appointment and he should call me back in one hour. He didn't. And probably because his office was closing at 5 p.m. So his quitting on schedule was more important than a customer.

 

They probably closed the books on me as a success and I will have to call gain tomorrow and get another incompetent techhie on the phone to waste another 45 minutes of my time. Both Tot and TT&T do not stand a chance of losing money no matter of how piss poor they do. What is lacking is a sense of fairness. I paid for 30 days of service, not 27. Or 25 or whatever. They contracted to give me a whole month's good service but have not done so in good faith. These people are not men and women of their word and they have no pride in keeping their promises. Only the customer loses. And that is why the internet service here in Thailand is going to remain third world for at least a few years to come.

Edited August 15, 2007 by jackcorbett

[Eneukman 1]

I think the only way to get a refund is to take a Thai national to their offices and let her scream and yell at them. Unless you are fluent in Thai, farangs have very little chance in getting any satisfaction from these incompetent wankers!

 

Alan

[jacko 8,866]

Darn, I'll stick with my my Edge/GPRS then. It's slow and crap, but it is cheap.

Edited August 17, 2007 by jacko

[Sammy 30]

I am using TOT IPStar satellite. I pay 2025/month for the 1Mbps/512Kbps. Some days it works, other days its best just to go for a swim. The biggest problem is that most, if not all of TOT's servers are black listed by Spamcop, SORBS and Abuseat. A lot of companies use those services to help with their inhouse "Spam Blockers." Very frustrating because people are not receiving my e-mails. I have complained to TOT many times and have sent the reports from Spamcop and TOT still claim there is nothing wrong with their servers.

 

I have heard that CSloxinfo provides very good service but their prices are 4 times more expensive than TOT.

Edited August 19, 2007 by Sammy

[HILLY 9]

I have a 1 meg/512 up with Ji net through TTT. I have had this for 2 years and in that time it has only gone down very occasionally for a few hours. At 2700 Baht a month it is the best I have found. You can get faster with them but the cost is much higher.

 

There is a newer alternative which is a wireless sytem that cost about 2500 Baht a month. It picks up from a transmitter and advertises 2 meg down. In reality it gives about 1.3 to 1,4 meg and seems pretty reliable thiose that have it tell me. It depends if you have a transmitter in range of you also but they are adding many right now. I am going to give it a try alongside my JI net cafe ADSL and if it works OK will let you know. You get a receiver on the wall and away you go.

 

The contact details are CAT Call centre 081-3502157. What you want is the Hinet Premium.

[jacko 8,866]

I use a bolt on package with AIS... 750 baht/ month for 100 hours use. They claim 460kbps but I am sure that is the maximum, dreamers speed, mine varies from slow to stopped. You have to do your internet messing about at 5am. It slows down at 7.30 am.... crawls by 4pm and near stops after 6pm. What I save on a cheap service I might lose one day when the laptop flies through the window.

(Speedtest 99/24 at the 'good' time. pre-7am)

Edited August 20, 2007 by jacko

[vidman 2]

i have the 1024/256 for Bt1000 per month from tot and i must disagree with most people regarding the service. I had some teething probs when it was first installed but these were mostly the delay in them actually switching on the adsl on the line.

 

Interestingly, recently i have noticed a marked improvement in my actual speeds .

 

Check out www.speedtest.net and post your results here.

I have just done that (2pm time) my results are 888kb/s down and 423kb/s up

 

Now that aint bad.

 

I can browse the net, attach an IPA (always on)net phone adapter and stream uk tv to my telly all at the same time with no speed slow down problems.

 

The CAT system does seem interesting and i can actually see the CAT building from my window.....might investigate

[Eneukman 1]

I have an alleged 512/256 from TOT

 

Speedtest came out with - 327/202. Not very good in my book!

 

I think a lot also depends on where in Pattaya you stay.

 

Alan

[jackcorbett 2]

Check out www.speedtest.net and post your results here.

 

 

I don't find such speed tests to be all that accurate. For instance I have two connections, one with TOT I pay 140 baht for, the other with TT&T I pay 1200 baht per month for. The first, is the el cheapo connection everyone in this condo is getting through TOT. That is 60 units share whatever line TOT is also sharing with several other customers. The signal is all over the place with this setup. Rated speed is 512 upload and 1024 download. It will actually hit these speeds on a good day but at night when the Internet is busiest speeds can go down to 50 kps. I am going to call this connection Dog Shit 1 for test purposes.

 

The second connection is through TT&T. I pay 1200 baht a month for this not to mention the initial 8500 baht setup fee I had to pay which included my modem. It is rated 128 upload with a 256 download speed. TT&T informed us it would never put more than 10 people on our line after which it will start a new line to add customers onto. Lately it's been out for three days and particularly at night I had to switch to Dog Shit One as it had gotten impossibly slow. For test purposes I am going to call this connection Dog Shit 2.

 

I"ve been getting up real early lately---5 to 6 a.m. and I've noticed that Dog Shit 1 has been lightening fast. This is because hardly anyone's stupid enough to be up this early except for me. Today I performed the following tests at 7:30 a.m after Dog Shit one's already started to slow down.

 

Using the speed test recommended here I was getting speeds of 127 to 130 with Dog Shit I. That's ISDN speed, hardly the broadband claimed by both TOT and TT&T. I then switched over to my high dollar Dog Shit 2 connection. Dog Shit 2 gave me speeds of around 117 to 125, thus proving there is no meaningful difference between these two brands of dog shit and that both TOT and TT&T are lying.

 

Well, I decided to give them both a second chance. Because if you can't trust your internet supply company who can you trust, right? My test is based on the principle that whatever can do X amount of work in the least amount of time is better. I chose a 2.2 megabyte picture file to represent X amount of work and then I started up my ftp program using Dog Shit 2. My speed slowly built to around 256 as I downloaded this picture file from my web site to my hard drive thus proving that TTNT's claims are true in the sense that its output for my service is 256 WHEN IT'S WORKING. However, it took 1 minute and twenty-two seconds to download this file which is typical dogshit performance.

 

I then switched to my El Cheapo Dog Shit One connection all Wongamat Residence condo owners get from TOT. It took one minute to download the same 2.2 megabyte file with Dog Shit One while my ftp program showed a speed of 350 kps. However I did notice a jerkiness in the download showing evidence of stopping and starting.

 

So using the principle that whatever does X amount of work in the least amount of time is the fastest one has to conclude that Dog Shit 1 is better than Dog Shit 2 since it takes TT&T's Dog Shit 2 22 seconds longer or roughly 33 % longer to download the same file that Dog Shit 1 manages to download in just 60 seconds. Considering that Dog Shit 1 only costs about 13 % of what Dog Shit 2 costs, by using ftp as a test medium I'd have to conclude that eating Dog Shit one early in the morning is as the Thais say, cheaper and better than having to eat Dog Shit two. That's at 7:30 this particular morning. Who knows, consuming Dog Shit 2 might be better at 10 p.m. this evening than having to consume Dog Shit 1.

 

But one thing I've learned and that is using ftp to analyze the speeds of different internet connections is far more useful than using speed services. such as speedtest.net. While such services might show that one's internet connection truly is dog shit, they really don't show all that much as to which one is the smelliest.

Edited August 22, 2007 by jackcorbett

[jacko 8,866]

Jack, thanks for a good laugh early in the morning.

(I too get onto the internet at silly times to get a useable speed).

[papillon 695]

speedtest.net is wank.

 

Most accurate speed indicator will be using a Newsgroup.

[torrenova 649]

Just an update:

 

Eventually, for the ease of doing so, I went with TOT 1024/512 which costs Bt1000 per month. Speeds up to about 870/423 but some blips down to 400/350. Just checked 811/412.

 

On a side note. I have a friend in View Talay 2 who has had this 1024/256/512 ? for a year and was offered by TOT in writing 4096 down for the same price as he has had it for a year. The paperwork is real but I have yet to see them selling this capacity.

[jackcorbett 2]

TNT has just recently doubled the speed of my connection I pay 1200 baht a month for. It had been 256 kps download with a 128 kps upload. So at no extra charge starting 1st of September it supposedly now is 512 and 256. Just checked it and the highest speed downloading a file was 430 kps. This was before 7 a.m. At night this connection still gets pretty slow. But for the most part I am getting around the Internet much faster than before.