Satellite Connection For Internet

[churchill]

can anyone give advice as to the best way to get a decent internet connection on Samui . I have a very poor land line and went to the telephone office in Naton and asked about their satellite connection and they did not recommend it saying that it was difficult to get a connection when it was cloudy ! They recommended I went to the post office in Naton top floor which also offers satellite . Any other suggestions ?

Edited May 31, 2007 by churchill

[jcgodber]

I had TOT come out and set up an IPSTAR with a 100.0 mbps connection so far so good. I got rained out for an hour today by a very heavy storm but normaly works just fine.

Jim

[womble]

There are various options depending on where you are.

1.) Wireless - Lamai, Chaweng, Bo Bhut, Maenam, maybe a few other places. For information on this vist IT centre in Lamai on ringroad, the tall modern looking building. This does not require a phone line.

2.) TOT phone with broadband - Visit TOT office nathon

3.) TT&T phone with broadband, maxnett, they have office in Tesco Lotus Chawwng.

4.) Satelite, very expensive and although always connected, you pay by the amount of mega bits you use each month. If you download music etc, you could easily pay over 6k a month!! And yeah like UBC it stops working in heavy cloud cover.

You should only need satelite if you live somewhere where there is eigher no phone line or no wireless connection.

Which area do u live in, some services are only available in certain areas, Satelite is available everywhere, but hopefully you could use one of the other options.

[The Vulcan]

the samui it center on the main road near tesco has the cat cdma phones, modems (download speed up to 153 kb/s) and the sierra aircard for laptom (download speed up to 1-1.5 mb/s)

the equipment and internet speeds have been discussed in computer forum

can be a good alternative to modem or adsl

tel. 0815386821

Posted by Anthos under "Recommended Tradesmen" section

[churchill]

There are various options depending on where you are.

1.) Wireless - Lamai, Chaweng, Bo Bhut, Maenam, maybe a few other places. For information on this vist IT centre in Lamai on ringroad, the tall modern looking building. This does not require a phone line.

2.) TOT phone with broadband - Visit TOT office nathon

3.) TT&T phone with broadband, maxnett, they have office in Tesco Lotus Chawwng.

4.) Satelite, very expensive and although always connected, you pay by the amount of mega bits you use each month. If you download music etc, you could easily pay over 6k a month!! And yeah like UBC it stops working in heavy cloud cover.

You should only need satelite if you live somewhere where there is eigher no phone line or no wireless connection.

Which area do u live in, some services are only available in certain areas, Satelite is available everywhere, but hopefully you could use one of the other options.

I am moving to the Bang Por area , the normal telphone line gives a poor internet connection - If I upgrade to a broadband service will that improve things ? I am thinking of getting apple tv to download music plus video etc and , not being an expert , want the best option .

Thanks for your advice so far - I will also contact the samui it centre near tesco to see what they offer .

[womble]

There are various options depending on where you are.

1.) Wireless - Lamai, Chaweng, Bo Bhut, Maenam, maybe a few other places. For information on this vist IT centre in Lamai on ringroad, the tall modern looking building. This does not require a phone line.

2.) TOT phone with broadband - Visit TOT office nathon

3.) TT&T phone with broadband, maxnett, they have office in Tesco Lotus Chawwng.

4.) Satelite, very expensive and although always connected, you pay by the amount of mega bits you use each month. If you download music etc, you could easily pay over 6k a month!! And yeah like UBC it stops working in heavy cloud cover.

You should only need satelite if you live somewhere where there is eigher no phone line or no wireless connection.

Which area do u live in, some services are only available in certain areas, Satelite is available everywhere, but hopefully you could use one of the other options.

I am moving to the Bang Por area , the normal telphone line gives a poor internet connection - If I upgrade to a broadband service will that improve things ? I am thinking of getting apple tv to download music plus video etc and , not being an expert , want the best option .

Thanks for your advice so far - I will also contact the samui it centre near tesco to see what they offer .

You will definatley need a highspeed connection if you want to download media, and unless you have money to burn satrelite is not really an option.

I'm not even sure if you can get broadband in Bang por, or even wireless, you may be stuck with dial up.

Best check with all the offices, they have been upgrading so you may be in luck.

To get broadband through the landline you have to be within a certain range of their nearest box, not sure exact distance but it isn't that far. That's why many out of the way places do not have internet.

[churchill]

OK Thanks for your help

[Master of the court]

There are various options depending on where you are.

1.) Wireless - Lamai, Chaweng, Bo Bhut, Maenam, maybe a few other places. For information on this vist IT centre in Lamai on ringroad, the tall modern looking building. This does not require a phone line.

2.) TOT phone with broadband - Visit TOT office nathon

3.) TT&T phone with broadband, maxnett, they have office in Tesco Lotus Chawwng.

4.) Satelite, very expensive and although always connected, you pay by the amount of mega bits you use each month. If you download music etc, you could easily pay over 6k a month!! And yeah like UBC it stops working in heavy cloud cover.

You should only need satelite if you live somewhere where there is eigher no phone line or no wireless connection.

Which area do u live in, some services are only available in certain areas, Satelite is available everywhere, but hopefully you could use one of the other options.

Im not on Samui now....so I hope you can help me out.......Im interested in the Wireless, but I live just outside Ban Rak, but its actually Bophut, do you think it will be possible ?

Whats the deal with wireless........do I pay a monthly fee or how does it work.......?? even I need connection in Bophut, I still need to go to the Lami office ?

Thanks

MOTC

[churchill]

Went to CAT today and they offer , in Bang Por area , a free connection to Broad Band ( not a telephone line but dedicated internet connection cable), costs starting from 1,000 baht per month depending on speed required etc- So I think that is what I will go for .

They say speeds vary depening on how many people are using the same service , but I expect better than satellite .

[BigC]

i ha one before it was total rubbish. it was supposed to be 512 kps but it was slower than a 56 k modem.

it used to wird for abot10 mins of the day.

i had to cancell it and pay the 3 month fine.

alot of the contract well all of them say that if you want to cancel then you have to pay 3 months fine.

it is worth waiting. i waited about 6 months for adsl. it has problem but iat least it doesn;t take 10 minutes to download a page.

as someone said it depends where you are i was athe bottom of a mountain. they reckon that the trea blocked the signal.

that was just my experience. tot are about 2000 baht a month for 1 mg. adsl cable s about 1000. don';t got to a private comany. they wil install it straight away. then charge you about 4600 per month.

some people will pay it because they are desperate for interent . till they realise they have to buy there way out of the contract.

[kdvsn]

I had TOT come out and set up an IPSTAR with a 100.0 mbps connection so far so good. I got rained out for an hour today by a very heavy storm but normaly works just fine.

Jim

There's no way that you got a 100.0 mbps connection from IPSTAR, that's absurd.

[sbk]

I had TOT come out and set up an IPSTAR with a 100.0 mbps connection so far so good. I got rained out for an hour today by a very heavy storm but normaly works just fine.

Jim

There's no way that you got a 100.0 mbps connection from IPSTAR, that's absurd.

Many people mistakenly believe the 100 mbps speed that their connection shows is their connection speed. It is the LAN cable speed to the modem. Use the broadband test link at the top of the page to get a real test of your speed.

[StickKettleOn]

Do not ever sign up for IPSTAR. It is, quite frankly, a load of cock.

For me, the speed was no issue - and the weather conditions seemed to bare no affect on the connection. I rceal a few real heavy tropical storms and it worked fine.

It is the service that is the problem. Unfortunatley i dont live on Samui right now, but i do have TOT ADSl where i am in LOS and it breaks down maybe once a week, but is back up in a few hours. With IPSTAR, i found that downtime could not be resolved remotley. Customer service never had a clue and would send out 2 techs everytime i had a problem. The trouble was, the techs were based in Surathani, and it was always minimum 3 day wait before they even left - and then they had to drive to Donsak, catch the ferry, stay in Nathon for the night as strangely they would always get the last ferry to Samui, drive to Ban Rak to my place only to swap the router over, which always worked.

This was three times a month - in any one month i reckon i was good for 2 weeks connection.

The cost? 25,000 for the dish and 7000 a month.

The funny thing is, looking back on it i appreciate what a newbie i was. Whenever the guys would come out to swap over the modem, i always had to pay for there 'hotel in Nathon' plus ferry back to Surathani and a few quid for petrol. Total cost to get custmer service out was usualy around 2500 Baht. No wonder they came three times a month. They probably had a timed charger in the router fixed to detonate every 8/9 days - just so i would call them and get them out again.

Plus, the 'agent' at the computer shop which i would love to mention but i wont, did not tell me that i had to pay extra for the mega bits downloaded each month. My bad for not reading the finer points of the agreement i guess, but i just took his word for it that 7000 Baht a month would be unlimited. A humble 20 minute Ricci Gervais podcast download would have cost me the price of a chang, without knowing it. That Ron Jeremy & Traci Lordes 5 hour fest that i downloaded probably cost me the equivelent of a night up Solo bar, with brass piled on top of me.

I can say this, as my bill after 3 months of service was 32.000 baht for 'data downloaded'. This excludes the 7000 baht a month rental.

Obviously, i told them to bugger off. I had no problem paying the 7000 Baht per month - but i was clearly misinformed/stitched up on the data transfer issue and so i told them to go bugger themselves.

Hope that helps.

[RakSamui]

i have been using the CAT CDMA card. cost 12900 baht to buy then 630 per month. good speeds can be used all over thailand. tried it several places in Samui works fine. highly reccomended.

on a side note nice to see stick back, how long before the next ban. we should run a book on it.

[Rooo]

Test your Internet connection bandwidth

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last Result:

Download Speed: 474 kbps (59.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 316 kbps (39.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Internet speed test for Internet broadband © 2006 thaivisa.com

Ichiwawa.

[sbk]

i have been using the CAT CDMA card. cost 12900 baht to buy then 630 per month. good speeds can be used all over thailand. tried it several places in Samui works fine. highly reccomended.

on a side note nice to see stick back, how long before the next ban. we should run a book on it.

528 download speed, 185 upload on a wireless connection.

On my sister's microwave/radio internet in the US Wonderful, I will miss it greatly

I asked about this marvelous technology in a thread in the internet/computer forum. Pity they can't do it in Thailand.

And just as a note; banning is permanent. suspension is temporary.

[DrFisher]

We just got rid of IPSTAR on the first of the month it never worked properly and never ran at full speed. We switched to TOT high speed it is 4 times faster than IPSTAR and only costs

500 ฿ per month. We bought a wireless router for 2000 ฿ so no need for running wires and more than one person can be on the internet at a time.

[The Vulcan]

Cat/Telecom

Pay 2700 per month and no problems at all

Last Result:

Download Speed: 1701 kbps (212.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 651 kbps (81.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

[Thaddeus]

Some of the posts in this thread have me a little bit confused.

I have the basic TOT ipstar. It cost 2,500 Baht to install and then is 1,605 per month...... for the speed, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

There have never been any extra charges for the amount of data I transmit or receive..... and trust me, I am a heavy user.

Cloud cover has never been an issue, only a really heavy downpour has caused the signal to fail. The sunspot activity that also causes UBC to black out has been more of a problem recently. (TOT cannot be held accountable for that)

The connection does fail periodically (404 errors), I just wait five minutes (play a game of solitaire) and it is usually working again, my friends on dial-up or ADSL have exactly the same issues and they are down to the shoddy Thai internet infrastructure, not the way you are connected to it. If it isn't working again after 5 minutes, I reset the router and that usually does the trick.

I can't comment about the service side i.e. engineers having to visit. Because I have never required it.

These bills of extra thousands of Baht for 'data downloaded'..... are they from TOT directly? .... very odd.

Ipstar isn't brilliant, I'll be the first to admit it, but it is nowhere near as bad as some are trying to make out.

[StickKettleOn]

Thaddeus

The 2500 that you paid; that was for installation only. Did you pay anything extra for the dish? That is where most of my money went. Extortionate. Then again, i had not been in LOS too long at the time and with a permanent hangover to boot. Thais have a sixth sense for suckers (and so do i, albeit in a different context) and they may have seen me coming a mile away, and decided to stitch me up. Here is a newbie, looks like he has been hitting it hard since he has been here so lets tuck up the naive brain frazzled guy and rob him blind. I dont know, maybe. Maybe it was just more expensive 3.5 years ago. Either way, it was ten times more than you paid.

The extra payment for maga bites downloaded came after 3 or 4 months. My service went down, so i called them up and they aranged to send the techs out. Techs came - usual routine; i gave them a couple of thousand and they installed a new modem. New modem did not work so they called the hotline. Hotline told them i had been cut off as i had not paid the bill. What bill? I said.... i have paid 7000 every month on time, even though i have only had 50% active internet. 'No Mr. You not clear bill for data' I did not know anything about this.

I went down to the shop, told the agent i had enough enough and politley informed him i would not be paying the bill for data recieved. I lived there for another year i think, and did not recieve an official bill of any kind for the 'extra data' so i do wonder if the whole thing was a stitch up.

[Totster]

With TOT IPstar the equipment comes "free" on loan. No extra charges.

totster

[Master of the court]

We just got rid of IPSTAR on the first of the month it never worked properly and never ran at full speed. We switched to TOT high speed it is 4 times faster than IPSTAR and only costs

500 ฿ per month. We bought a wireless router for 2000 ฿ so no need for running wires and more than one person can be on the internet at a time.

500 pr. Month......now we are talking......could you tell me where exactly did you sign up for that deal DrFisher ??

Thanks

[Thaddeus]

I went down to the shop, told the agent i had enough enough and politley informed him i would not be paying the bill for data recieved. I lived there for another year i think, and did not recieve an official bill of any kind for the 'extra data' so i do wonder if the whole thing was a stitch up.

Yip ..... I think they did see you coming, as there is definitely no extra charge for data and as Totster pointed out earlier, you don't buy the dish and box, they remain property of TOT.

I don't know if you could have done at your location, but if you had dealt with TOT directly, you wouldn't have had that many issues, certainly not excessive monetary ones.

[Totster]

I went down to the shop, told the agent i had enough enough and politley informed him i would not be paying the bill for data recieved. I lived there for another year i think, and did not recieve an official bill of any kind for the 'extra data' so i do wonder if the whole thing was a stitch up.

Yip ..... I think they did see you coming, as there is definitely no extra charge for data and as Totster pointed out earlier, you don't buy the dish and box, they remain property of TOT.

I don't know if you could have done at your location, but if you had dealt with TOT directly, you wouldn't have had that many issues, certainly not excessive monetary ones.

As far as I remember from reading on the forum, the IPstar service from CSLoxinfo was/is expensive due to having to buy the equipment, and pretty much next to useless in performance.

I am glad to say I am very happy with the cost and performance of TOT IPstar.

totster

[george]

Data transfer is not unlimited with CS-Loxinfo IPstar:

http://www.csloxinfo.com/ipstar4_non_e.asp#sme

Ipstar by TOT is unlimited bandwidth.

Avoid CS-Loxinfo like a plauge,

[Master of the court]

We just got rid of IPSTAR on the first of the month it never worked properly and never ran at full speed. We switched to TOT high speed it is 4 times faster than IPSTAR and only costs

500 ฿ per month. We bought a wireless router for 2000 ฿ so no need for running wires and more than one person can be on the internet at a time.

500 pr. Month......now we are talking......could you tell me where exactly did you sign up for that deal DrFisher ??

Thanks

[PaulAllen]

My neighbor has TOT ADSL. I bought a wireless router and now we share his connection and split the bill so we get good internet connection for only 350 baht each per month.

Also, I am next to a hotel that has free wi-fi and can connect to it as well.

I think for being on an island in Thailand just have any connection is a blessing.

Has anyone tried the Ichiwara wireless connection yet? They say they are going to be covering the whole island yet I only see their network on my computer very sporadically.

[anthos]

i have been using the CAT CDMA card. cost 12900 baht to buy then 630 per month. good speeds can be used all over thailand. tried it several places in Samui works fine. highly reccomended.

Just to clarify

It's been said in TV computer forum that it doesnt work in Bangkok and Pattaya within Hutch network (used by CAT in that area) at least for now until both companies decide to merge.

Another issue - upload speed is much much lower than download on this CDMA cards

as a result you can't have 2 way video chat by skype or similar, only one way - people won't be able to see you

these are the only 2 critical issues, other comments have been good so far

would be interesting to see a speedtest results from the card

I'm using cat cdma regular phone since november, have been no billing yet

wonder how long will the test period take.

[anthos]

i have been using the CAT CDMA card. cost 12900 baht to buy then 630 per month. good speeds can be used all over thailand. tried it several places in Samui works fine. highly reccomended.

528 download speed, 185 upload on a wireless connection.

ah missed it. here's the test speed

guess 158 upload can even handle a skype video with an average webcam

[PaulAllen]

I thought the way satellite internet worked was you use the satellite only to receive and have to use a phone line to send data. Correct? I don't think the satellite dish actually sends a signal back up to the satellite does it?