Ip Star

[GetBackJoJo]

Hi All

I have had enough with TOT and doubt if any other providers will offer a much better service. I also doubt if things are going to get better short term.... im guessing months or possibly years of laughable internet speeds. This is affecting my job now, and begining to affect my income. I need to act on this right away.

My question is; would IP Star be a good alternative? I figure that as the service is sattelite based, the connection would avoid all Thai landlines and thus offer a quicker service?

I would appreciate any feedback from IP Star users here. Is it worth it, how much do you pay per month and is the service reliable?

Thanks.

[RKASA]

I only use 256/128 but at that speed it has always worked 100%.  The only outage was vary heavy rain storm local and last sunday, but that was nation wide and the only un weather related out I ever had.  I also use it to supply phone service to the house which still worked during the Sunday outage as I used it to call ToT about the internet problem.  At higher speeds I can't be sure, I was going to upgrade this month, but put it off.  It's 1500 a month, but they have biz packages as well and home packages that get up to 1024/512.

[cloudhopper]

I'm an ex-IPstar user. Unless you have absolutely NO other alternative it's not worth the pain...

[monty]

iPSTAR won't be any better, your traffic still has to go through the Thai international gateways.

On top of it you'll pay a higher price for a connection with comparable sharing ratio as compared with a landline. Reason being the high cost of the equipment involved.

There are also some disadvantages unique to sat connections, namely high latency. Ping times just to the server in bangkok will be 600 msec or higher, add to that the average 300msec latency to the US and you'll seldom see pings of under 1 second. Can be pretty annoying for VOIP, and also many VPN's struggle with it.

For these reasons it's best used if absolutely no other options are available!

Depending on location you might be able to get a dedicated line from CAT, quality on the higher end of the scale in Thailand (which still is far from perfect unfortunately) but reasonable prices, and some exotic options such as symmetric speeds are available as well...

[Gary A]

My TOT Ipstar absolutely stinks. I have had all three speeds, 1024/512, 512/256 and 256/128. I have now downgraded back to 256/128 because it is the cheapest and is no worse than the 1024/512. Unfortunately I live out in the boonies and have no choice other than GPRS which is actually better at times.