Thailand Internet Newbie

[Jookster]

Can someone tell me a good ISP. My apartment is ridicolously expensive at 1500 baht a month.

Are contracts minimum 1 year and all that, at one address?

Thanks

Chris

[Gumballl]

Add a little more info as to what level of service you need. Also, tell us about your existing service. Maybe it is worth the 1500 baht.

[monty]

If it's a shared service (where the condo management subscribes with an ISP and then shares it in the building), it's probably too expensive since speeds will vary too much depending on other's people usage.

If you want private internet, like adsl on your own phoneline, you'll soon find that internet IS ridiculously expensive in Thailand.

Blame it on the monopoly of the international bandwidth by a government organization.

The home packages are not expensive (around 1000 Baht/month for 1024kbps), but they rarely perform good, with speeds often dropping to dial-up level during peak times. Home packages also often have several protocols throttled or even blocked, especially P2P and Bittorent download protocols. Do note that you can get lucky, depending on location etc., and get good speeds on home packages. Unfortunately this is more exception then rule. These packages often also suffer from package loss, and very short moments of no data transfer, making VOIP connections and for example streaming audio (radio) suffer from frequent break ups/re-buffering...

If you move one step up to the small business packages, prices jump up a lot, reckon on paying some 3500 Baht/month for 1024/512 kbps access. On these packages however you can expect stable speeds of 70% or more of rated speed pretty much always!

[Veazer]

...Home packages also often have several protocols throttled or even blocked, especially P2P and Bittorent download protocols. Do note that you can get lucky, depending on location etc., and get good speeds on home packages. Unfortunately this is more exception then rule. These packages often also suffer from package loss, and very short moments of no data transfer, making VOIP connections and for example streaming audio (radio) suffer from frequent break ups/re-buffering...

I've found that the traffic throttling can vary a lot depending on provider and location. I often have times where I can barely open web pages due to slow loading and time-outs but if I start bit torrent I can still reach speeds of 100-115KBps (on a 1024/512 connection). Browsing on my friend's 512/256 connection is generally much faster than my house, but p2p is essentially unusable for him. That's pretty lousy bandwidth management imho.

[monty]

That's pretty lousy bandwidth management imho.

Unfortunately very true.

You would be amazed with how high a contention ratio ISP's in the West can keep their customers happy. Purely due to excellent bandwidth management/bandwidth distribution!

If they ever get to manage the little bandwidth they have over here, things would be much better...