I've been on Koh Phayam in Ranong province the past 3 weeks which has been my first experience of IP Star. The island relies on individual power generators and has no cables to the mainland, not even a mobile phone mast (only the main village receives a signal from onshore).

Considering the system is satellite-based it has worked reasonably reliably, although slowly during the daytime. European dial-up speeds only, although good enough for Skype speech and a crackly VOIP line. At night it speeds up a bit BUT the past two evenings 4-5 Jan '07) it went off completely at 21.30 hours, and wasn't back on again until well into the next day.

Have other users experienced these long outages? Are they frequent, or just related to the Taiwan cable break? I need a reliable service for work. Slow speeds are acceptable. Whilst a remote Thai island may be idylllic, I may have to base myself near a hard-wired Internet source if problems like this continue.

Also, did you buy or rent your receiving equipment? How much? One of the resort owners on neighboring Koh Chang (Ranong) pays a mere Baht 1,500 per month all-in to rent it from TOT.

Over to other IP Star users ...

I've got an IPStar satellite connection on Koh Phangan. I pay 2000 baht a month for a 256kbps, with a 5000 baht installation/setup fee (I can apparently move the satellite to almost anywhere in Thailand for ~1500 baht) and a one-year prepaid contract with IPStar. I need it for work, but was warned not to pay double for 512kbps until I tried it out for awhile. Two of the local Internet cafes here recently switched from IPStar satellite back to dial-up because of the number of recent outages and the cruddy customer service. They both blame what they saw as a recent decrease in service on Thaksin selling IPStar to Singapore early last year, but that may just be political grumbling.

When I got it hooked up in mid-November the service during the day was pretty terrible (56k tops), but it sped up considerably after the end of the business day (160k dl rates at the very best). There were brief 1-2 hour outages for the first few weeks - I heard these may have been caused by storms in Bangkok - then service was steady for most of December. I've quickly gotten used to doing bandwidth-heavy work in the evening and don't see the need to pay double for double the speed.

I've noticed exceptionally slow speeds and shortages during the day again since the earthquake which I've attributed to ongoing repair work. But the night of Jan 5th (not sure about the 4th) it was up all night well past 21.30 with good rates.

Which provider are you both using please ?

totster