ADSL speeds in Pattaya

[PattayaPete 532]

Here's the reality of broadband in Thailand.

 

International bandwidth is controlled by CAT and TOT. It is a government monopoly and they charge 25,000 baht per magabit (1024) of bandwidth. That means that isp's are going to either charge a fortune or have a very high loading of customers per megabit. Otherwise they would go broke.

 

Reporting speed test results is fruitless as every test and every tester will have a different contention ratio. You may be lucky and have just a few people on when you test. You may be lucky and have less people sharing your line overall. Someone else with the same service and cost may not be so lucky. Trying to determine who is the best by different people doing speed tests is pretty much a waste of time.

 

If you want good, reliable speed you will have to pay for it. The standard TT&T and TOT packages at around 1,000 baht a month are crap shoots. You may be lucky for a while you may not. If a guy sharing your bandwidth is on 24/7 downloading torrents then your speed is going to suck. If you are sharing with 50 guys who check their email once every two days you win.

 

Both TOT and T&T have higher priced packages around the 3,000 baht mark. At that price you do get more reliable speed but you can still be unlucky and end up sharing with a bandwidth hog. All you can do is connect a service and see how it goes. If it does not go well there is virtually no chance that complaining will improve the situation. Just try another service.

 

Once you have a phone line installed the monthly cost of just the phone line is about 120 baht. At that price it is economical to have both services in your home and you can pick and choose which isp to use. I have both TOT and TT&T and I have adsl on both lines. With TT&T I use JI Net as the ISP and they have been consistently good. They charge 2850 a month for their cyber cafe service wich is 1024/512. On the TOT line I have the TOT business package. Costs about 2,900 a month and is slower than TT@T for general surfing.

 

The other thing about internet in Thailand is that the techs are not very knowledgeable when it comes to throttling and load sharing. These are the methods used to stop people hogging too much bandwidth. Depending on how it is set up you may find surfing is fast but torrents are slow. Sadly these things are usually poorly set up on each node and once again it's down to luck of the draw on how your line is set up as to how well it performs.

 

With my TOT line I consistently get speeds of 1300 kbits when downloading from newsgroups but rarely see anything better than 500 kbits when surfing. With TT&T I usually surf at about 900 kbits and newsgorps run about 1,000 kbits. I therefore use TOT exclusively for downloading from newsgroups and TT&T for surfing. A good solution for me but at a cost of 6,000 baht a month.

 

The bottom line here is that if you get a cheap package at about 1,000 a month then it will be pure luck as to what sort of speed you get. Just because Guy 1 has a good experience with that package don't expect the same.

[Eneukman 1]

TOT's engineers don't have a clue.

 

Two of them came to my condo and told me that my problems were being casused by my firewall - Zone Alarm. They also contended (as do AOL) that you don't need a firewall.

 

Two minutes after they left. the service went down again! It took over an hour to get through to the office. They came back just before 5.00 pm and this time admitted that the problem was in Bangkok. Totally clueless!

 

Alan

[torrenova 649]

there is also the language barrier. I could explain all this in English but because my linguistic skills are lacking, I would not be able to go into it so technically in German. In Thai, I would not know where to begin.

[aqua4 2]

It makes more sense if we can see what we are getting.

 

http://speedtest.thaivisa.com/

 

Download Speed: 801 kbps (100.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 397 kbps (49.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

 

That is what I get on the True package of 700 Baht a month,

[joekicker 53]

Reality check, aqua:

 

That is what you got on your connection at the moment you tested. At a different time, say 10 seconds before or after, you would get a different result. A different person across town, at exactly the same moment, would get a different result.

 

If we had a couple of hundred tests at the same time, it would INDICATE what was going on at that time, but still wouldn't be all that indicative of what we might expect tonight.

 

Just for fun I did the same test on my True line that's rated a little faster and more expensive than yours:

 

Download Speed: 1883 kbps (235.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 417 kbps (52.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

 

That is at 6:15 in the morning. In two hours, that will be quite a different download speed, I imagine, but the only way I'll know is to test it in two hours.

 

 

Two of them came to my condo and told me that my problems were being casused by my firewall - Zone Alarm. They also contended (as do AOL) that you don't need a firewall. dhorse dhorse

 

Presuming you have a router, which you usually do with the TOT accounts, they are not wrong. Note "not wrong". It is possible and in my view superior to use the router as your firewall, just because hardware is always superior to software in security. That doesn't mean they are right, but if you have a router, they are not wrong.

 

I have no idea about your specific setup, Alan, but it is possible that Zone Alarm is your main problem if you have chronic problems, repeat POSSIBLE.

Edited September 20, 2007 by joekicker