Tot - Ripoff - 3000b Bus Gold Same Speed As 1000b Service

[jeffrosner]

When I signed up for DSL I asked what was the fastest service and was told 1024/512 or Bus Gold 1024/512. I was told that if I wanted throughput to America or Europe the Gold was faster. Turns out to be crap.

I have a friend a few miles away who has TOT 1024/512. I had him do a speedtest to a server in America at the same time I did.

We have the same speeds. Everything was the same. Within just a few k either way.

Did TOT make everyone faster with regular service or have I been getting ripped off to the tune of 2000 baht a month for service that gets me nothing.

The only thing I can think of as the real difference between the two services, is that I should be able to run a server / web server from my connection (which I am not) and that is why it is called Business Gold.

How close am I?

I'm off Sukumvhit in North Pattaya.

JR

[jeffrosner]

What if I downgrade to save 2000 baht a month? Has anyone done this? I'm afraid that taking something that works and allowing them to make changes could spell disaster - why give them a chance to screw it up? I depend on this connection.

[poorfarang]

I wouldnt be surpirsed if you were getting ripped off.

A friend of mine had a similar experience. He ended up calling up TOT and their response was "ooops, we forgot to up your speed to the gold plan" Didnt refund his money for the several months he was over charged either. Thats how it works in Thailand I guess. They will charge you more and hope you dont notice.

[jeffrosner]

It's not that I am not getting what I pay for. I am promised 1024 down and 512 up and I generally get 800 down and 400-500 up prior to the earthquake in Taiwan.

I pay 3000 baht a month for supposedly superior service to the normal home 1024/512

But my friend who has the cheaper service gets the same results I do.

So why am I getting charged 3 X as much as him?

[poorfarang]

You ARE not getting what you pay for.

Which is more likely, your friend getting bumped up to gold speed for free or this company ripping you off? Of course its the later.

[h90]

It's not that I am not getting what I pay for. I am promised 1024 down and 512 up and I generally get 800 down and 400-500 up prior to the earthquake in Taiwan.

I pay 3000 baht a month for supposedly superior service to the normal home 1024/512

But my friend who has the cheaper service gets the same results I do.

So why am I getting charged 3 X as much as him?

800/400-500 does not sound bad

[DragonQuest]

it also depends where you live, weather conditions, and forecast, you never get what you pay for, you just get ripped off or over-priced lol

[jeffrosner]

It's not that I am not getting what I pay for. I am promised 1024 down and 512 up and I generally get 800 down and 400-500 up prior to the earthquake in Taiwan.

I pay 3000 baht a month for supposedly superior service to the normal home 1024/512

But my friend who has the cheaper service gets the same results I do.

So why am I getting charged 3 X as much as him?

800/400-500 does not sound bad

It does when your friend pays 2/3 less than you do for the same thing from the same company.

[Phil Conners]

The way it works is, with the cheap plan you have, say, 20 people sharing a 1024/512 line. With the more expensive plan you only have, say, 5 people sharing the same line. I don't recall the exact numbers but you get the idea. If you're lucky those who share with you are not very active and you get great throughput. If you're unlucky the others have huge downloads going 24/7 and you get crap through put.

In other words, paying more is no guarantee you get a faster line, but your chances are better.

[nikster]

The way it works is, with the cheap plan you have, say, 20 people sharing a 1024/512 line. With the more expensive plan you only have, say, 5 people sharing the same line. I don't recall the exact numbers but you get the idea. If you're lucky those who share with you are not very active and you get great throughput. If you're unlucky the others have huge downloads going 24/7 and you get crap through put.

In other words, paying more is no guarantee you get a faster line, but your chances are better.

That makes sense. You are not paying for higher speed but for higher availability. Which, if you are a business, you will want. 2000 baht is nothing compared to losing some business because of a crap connection.

If the normal gold speed happens to be very reliable for a while, the two will be the same of course.

At the same time, it doesn't seem to be a particularly attractive plan you are on...

I do business over the web but I have normal gold cyber 1024 + a slow GPRS backup. It would be interesting to see if the gold business goes down as much as the normal gold connection, or gets fixed faster. You would think so...

[monty]

Another difference between the normal cheaper packages and the business versions is that on the latter there are no restrictions.

On the cheap packages most often P2P connections are throttled down to maybe 10% of line speed, or even blocked altogether. For some reason VOIP connections sometimes are blocked as well.

So in general the advantage on the more expensive packages are:

* Lower contention ratio (=less sharing) resulting in a more stable speed throughout the day, i.e. no slowing down during peak times.

* No blocking of certain protocols...

I did an upgrade to a business package some time ago and the difference was definitely noticeable, especially during peak times....

And the price is certainly not out of the ordinary at 3000/month for a 1024 business package (I pay 1600/month for 256/128!)

[jeffrosner]

Another difference between the normal cheaper packages and the business versions is that on the latter there are no restrictions.

On the cheap packages most often P2P connections are throttled down to maybe 10% of line speed, or even blocked altogether. For some reason VOIP connections sometimes are blocked as well.

So in general the advantage on the more expensive packages are:

* Lower contention ratio (=less sharing) resulting in a more stable speed throughout the day, i.e. no slowing down during peak times.

* No blocking of certain protocols...

I did an upgrade to a business package some time ago and the difference was definitely noticeable, especially during peak times....

And the price is certainly not out of the ordinary at 3000/month for a 1024 business package (I pay 1600/month for 256/128!)

I wish I could say this is true. Lately I am constantly clicking Retry in Firefox for all webpages - My speed is fluctuating and it has been unreliable since the Earthquake. My connection gets dropped for a few seconds much too often which makes a remote session or ssh session impossible to hold.

I'm going to give maxnet a good run for the money and see if it lets me do all that I can do now with TOT Bus Gold. If so, I'll downgrade from bus to regular, save myself 1000 baht and use a router or Linux box to load balance the two 1024 connections to give myself failover and 2mbits when both are up.

My use is at nighttime so even if I have lot of people on my line - they are usually sleeping when I am awake.

[Firefoxx]

Actually, it depends. Normal home and business packages may be exactly the same, differing only in name. It depends on the policy of the ISP, the engineers setting it up, and perhaps your luck. You could try asking the sales person how they differ, but you could get conflicting answers (ie True) or get misinformation (CS Lox) or a blank look (Buddy). A lot of other factors can influence your experience, including pure blind luck.

[cdnvic]

Where is your local telephone exchange? If your friend is closer then that could be what's happening as DSL degrades over distance. Could be that the extra money you pay means that you are getting the enough extra bandwidth to ensure that you get close to the advertised speeds. If you dropped down to the residential package you could see a noticable drop if this is the case.

I'd check with someone close by for a fairer comparison, as even a kilometer can mean alot to DSL speed.

[monty]

Unfortunately what Firefox is posted is true (no pun intended )

I've been lucky so far with the Maxnet business package, delivering exactly what I expected from a package of which they say has a 1 to 10 contention ratio.

It was in my case an instant improvement when I upgraded from Maxnet@home to Maxnet@life.

Supposedly the Maxnet@home has a contention ratio of 1 to 40, resulting in speeds being all over the place, from full speed at 4 am to less then dial up speed at 8:30 in the morning...

But I also know of people (just a few though) on the home package getting speeds just as high as what I am getting. Guess it's blind luck, living in an area where there simply are not enough subscribers to load the line to the full 40 subscribers.

Or they live in an area where the tech just made a mistake and set the routers wrong giving them better service then what they pay for...

[h90]

It's not that I am not getting what I pay for. I am promised 1024 down and 512 up and I generally get 800 down and 400-500 up prior to the earthquake in Taiwan.

I pay 3000 baht a month for supposedly superior service to the normal home 1024/512

But my friend who has the cheaper service gets the same results I do.

So why am I getting charged 3 X as much as him?

800/400-500 does not sound bad

It does when your friend pays 2/3 less than you do for the same thing from the same company.

the speed sounds really good, I would just say your friend also gets a good service. But you can call them and ask them to reduce your friends speed to make it fair. You get 4/5 of the speed which is great.

[jeffrosner]

The interesting question is what happens if I tell them to start charging me the 1000b price? Do they rewire me, reroute me, or just drop my price and do nothing? I have Maxnet coming Tuesday so I'll test what speeds I get from that before doing anything with my TOT Bus Gold.

I have surmised that my HIGH speed is because I am in a community of homeowners, not business - so I may be the only one on the circuit. I'm also told by neighbors that no one has TOT - they all have phones from TT&T so got that for DSL - they also claim to get very good speeds here.

Edited February 11, 2007 by jeffrosner

[Prasert]

contention ratio for the 1024/512 package:

1:50 for the cheap one

1:20 for the expensive one

(This information came from a 2nd-line TOT engineer in Suratthani)

[jeffrosner]

contention ratio for the 1024/512 package:

1:50 for the cheap one

1:20 for the expensive one

(This information came from a 2nd-line TOT engineer in Suratthani)

Is that for the whole of TOT across the country or just in Suratthani?

[h90]

The interesting question is what happens if I tell them to start charging me the 1000b price? Do they rewire me, reroute me, or just drop my price and do nothing? I have Maxnet coming Tuesday so I'll test what speeds I get from that before doing anything with my TOT Bus Gold.

I have surmised that my HIGH speed is because I am in a community of homeowners, not business - so I may be the only one on the circuit. I'm also told by neighbors that no one has TOT - they all have phones from TT&T so got that for DSL - they also claim to get very good speeds here.

If you use it for business and you can buy the 1000 baht easily, I wouldn't risk any change. Actually maybe in times when everything slows down, maybe your connection is better.

I had the experience with True and it might be the same with other provider: I was one of the first in the area who got it and it was extrem fast. After some month it droped a lot in speed, but when I used the "turbo" where you pay additional per minute it was the same as before. Anyway if working good and and you need it for business I wouldn't change anything.

[Firefoxx]

Contention ratios are only a guideline. They may or may not reflect real world performance, depending on a lot of factors. For example, how do they implement the ratio, locally or network-wide? Do they spread it around evenly or not? How do they balance the load? Is there a heavy loader in your DSLAM? Etc. etc. For example, with True, you could get the exact same speed/type package with the supposed exact same contention ratio, and yet get COMPLETELY different international performance (same local performance, so NO it's doesn't have anything to do with the line quality/distance/etc that people commonly mistakenly attribute to ADSL speeds).

[Upcountry]

Yeah, testing international website access means you are testing the international link in addition to the local connections.

Good to test a local server first or generally, to verify speed.

I have a multi-frame page I made with both local and international web sites, to give me a clue if an outage is international, local, or with my ISP. Traceroute (tracert in Windows) can help give a sense of network delays too.

UC

[cdnvic]

NO it's doesn't have anything to do with the line quality/distance/etc that people commonly mistakenly attribute to ADSL speeds).

Distance is definitely a factor in DSL, as is line quality.

http://www.internode.on.net/adsl2/graph/

[jeffrosner]

This is the part that bothers me - They are running a line to my house (TT&T) as I am at the end of the block. My TOT gets top speed and I'm still at the end of the run.