Bring Back Dialup

[bkk_mike]

Pardon my French, - and I apologise for the rant...

But what is wrong with True this last couple of weeks.

(I've used True for years, and although basic web pages seem to be working, other things have simply stopped working.)

FTPs timeout repeatedly.

I can't send large attachments on emails (I'm not talking huge <2Mb).

Podcasts won't download - when I've been using the same software on the same PC on the same internet connection to download them for years.

The basic internet is working - and even my VPN connection to the office in London is staying up most of the time. It's just uploading or downloading large files no longer seems to work (except by using torrents - but that's because they work by downloading lots of very tiny fragments).

I've tried the office email system - but get "Network operation did not complete in a reasonable amount of time"

I've tried GMail on my non-work PC - but it simply never goes to "sent"

I've tried ftp-ing the files manually - but get "Netout :Connection reset by peer"

(and I've tried all of the above repeatedly and nothing works).

I am currently looking fondly back on when I had dial-up here.

I had to log in the day before and leave the PC on overnight to catch up on my work emails - but at least it worked.

When I sent a large attachment, my email system would be unusable for hours - but at least it worked.

As stated above I've been using True for years, and it's generally been OK for me (speed-wise not great, but fairly reliable until the last couple of weeks, except for Dec 2006 after the earthquake in Taiwan, when even the office connection between HK and Tokyo went down).

When will people in Thailand complain about the Internet here.

Do they not realise that in other countries, you click on videos in Youtube and they just start in a couple of seconds (you don't have to wait for them to finish downloading first)

Do they not realise that in other countries the internet is a lot cheaper. (I pay less than 1,200 baht a month in the UK for 24Mbps, with a static IP thrown in. I pay double that in Thailand for 512Kbps, with a dynamic IP).

I have two True phone lines.

I'd like to switch to my old dial-up ISP (Internet Thailand, or INET), but their ADSL packages assume you have a TOT line.

Can anyone suggest someone other than True as an ISP that is reasonably reliable, and that will work with a True phone line. (and I'm outside of CATs coverage area for their HINET package).

Obviously, I can keep my existing connection until I know if the new connection is better (the advantage of two phone lines).

And I don't care about the cheap packages - I simply need the Internet to work (my job's in London - I work remotely), but I'd prefer to be under 10,000 a month. If I find a reliable ISP, I'll probably switch the True package to one of the home packages, and use it as a backup.

[Dupont]

Well, we had a speedtest result of 23kbs last week on TOT!!!

The highest reading I have is 212 since february when I found the speedtest site. We pay for 1meg.

I am in the dark as to what to do next. Obviously the missus will not confront the TOT staff and cringes when I show them my print-outs and suggest I pay 30 baht per month instead of the 1,100 baht they charge. And my demonstration with a bag of crisps in their office, whereby I asked each member of staff to pay me 40 baht for the same bag, despite it already having been sold to somebody else, drew the expected blank looks and the wrath of the missus later

Noboby ever seems to take a complaint down in writing, the engineers just say its because they keep selling the bandwidth over and over again and won't come and look at it anymore (I got the engineers out a few times to piss them off and waste their time as much as anything).

What next? I havent seen the TOT head brass answering complaints in the media or anything.

In a nutshell, we have no standards, no competence, no complaints proceedure, no hope of improvement and nobody in a position of authority promising to do anything about it... even an obviously empty promise along the "hub of IT in Asia" lines would be better than what we have now.

[Crushdepth]

I've seen my ADSL go down to sub-dial up speeds on occasion. Suggest you set up your mobile as a backup internet connection, at least then you can get around 100K, and its only about 200 baht a month for 50 hours access these days.

[Veazer]

When will people in Thailand complain about the Internet here.

:D :D

3-4 times per hour if memory serves me correctly.

[BigSnake]

Are we. Chill out you are not along, dialup wasn't that great either.

[pitrevie]

Every so often I read in the Nation of some planned new infrastructure project which will make Thailand a hub for Asia, that word hub always gives me a good laugh. I believe this week it was railway hub. The airport hub has been and gone along with the Telecomms hub and I guess many other hubs. I give up trying to view any YouTube videos from about 4 p.m onwards as the whole thing slows to a crawl, some hub!

[MaxLee]

Welcome to Thailand,... all I gotta say is that you have to live with it.... This so called Highspeed Internet is nothing more than souped up Dial up connection

[percy2]

AT home I find that if I am running Azureus it stops everything, regardless if of the settings.

My answer has been to have 2 x adsl accounts at home , one for P2P and one for everything else.

On the Gmail front , the last few days I have also had problems sending mail , solution was to use a different smtp server.

Cheers

[libya 115]

I have switched to One2Call 20 hours 100 baht GPRS. It is quick enough for me, but I am just an emails and web-page browser. I rarely download big files, or use VOIP. I think GPRS is great because there is no connection flat fee, like the old dial-up which was 3 or 5 baht I forget.

[regedit]

cat hi-net works for me.

internet connection is the way most things work in thailand - 2 speeds only - slow and slower. live with it

[damole]

I realise that for a lot of people here their internet experience if far from a happy one but just to balance the debate a little I thought I 'd weigh in on the side of the satisfied customer.

I have MAXNet 1Mbp premier here in Chiang Mai and it works a treat. I can use Skype, download Torrents at the rated speed, watch streaming video from Youtube, BBC, CNN and ITN etc. Every time I run a speed test no matter what time of day I get more or less what I expect, see below.

I understand this doesn't help the people whose internet doesn't work as advertised but at least in Chiang Mai it would be unfair to suggest that Thailand is incapable of providing a real broadband ISP.

[bkk_mike]

If you read my post, I'm not complaining about not getting my rated speed - I am, pretty much.

And torrents are working fine. As was Skype last time I was talking on the webcam.

It's the reliability (or lack thereof) that's killing me at the moment. and this is new... (I had occasional disconnects before, but nothing that didn't work on a second or third try.) When I posted the rant, I had just spent 6 hours failing to send a 1.7MB spreadsheet to the office. I finally got an ftp over the VPN to work a couple of hours later. Back before I had ADSL here, I was using dialup, and although it was slow, it was far more reliable. I could have simply left my machine sending the email and known it would finish.

I've been using True ADSL for years (from back when you had to pay extra for international access). But it's suddenly become significantly more unreliable for sending large attachments, or receiving large files (except using http) in the last few weeks.

And it's actually quite an indictment on us all that, in Thailand, someone actually getting 800kbits per sec on a speed test site is seen as extremely fortunate. In most countries getting that from a speed test would be a bad result. (When in London, my normal speed on file downloads is 10 times faster than that, with torrents running in the background)

[damole]

Having re-read your post I thought that I'd suggest looking at your MTU. I had a problem a few weeks ago with accessing my Natiowide bank account on-line. I started getting time-outs on certain sections of the website and the front page was taking several minutes to complete loading before it would display the done message in the status bar. After ruling out my particualr machine by getting a friend to try it, he has the same connection as me, I decided to investigate further. With the help of Kitz I tracked it down to my MTU being too large and after reducing it to 1400 everything is now working fine.

I realise that this might not be the solution to your particular problem but it might be worth a try..

[JetsetBkk]

Having re-read your post I thought that I'd suggest looking at your MTU. I had a problem a few weeks ago with accessing my Natiowide bank account on-line. I started getting time-outs on certain sections of the website and the front page was taking several minutes to complete loading before it would display the done message in the status bar. After ruling out my particular machine by getting a friend to try it, he has the same connection as me, I decided to investigate further. With the help of Kitz I tracked it down to my MTU being too large and after reducing it to 1400 everything is now working fine.

I realise that this might not be the solution to your particular problem but it might be worth a try..

I started a thread about Nationwide and the MTU setting in January: How To Increase A D S L Router's MTU Setting

This was a major problem for me and took over a month before someone with any brains at Nationwide finally took an interest in my problem and mentioned "MTU".

I eventually used "TCP Optimizer" from Speedguide.net to reduce my MTU setting so that I could use all of the Nationwide site's functions - like transferring money! (My ADSL modem had no configuration setting for changing the MTU value.)

If you read that thread you will see that I actually told them to publicise the problem - at least amongst the "help" personnel - so that other customers could get the problem resolved quicker. I'd be interested to know if you sent any messages to Nationwide and who responded.

So you have Maxnet 1 Mbps Premier. I have "Maxnet 4 Home" 2.5 Mbps. Others have ruled out the ISP, but I wonder if it is a Maxnet problem?

[bkk_mike]

I don't think it's an MTU problem. Mainly because I had to manually set MTUs for the VPN a long time ago.

Add in that nothing on my side changed, and lots of things suddenly had issues all at once with large files...

I do seem to have found a solution for the podcasting software, which is to set up the True Proxy server on the connection settings. (Maybe True's turned off the transparent proxy for ftp cnnections, or something, so you now need to specify it manually).

[sniffdog]

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The highest reading I have is 212 since february when I found the speedtest site. We pay for 1meg.

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Dupont, you're making a couple of mistakes here and there is no need to complain to the nice people of TOT.

If you pay 1,000 baht + VAT you actually pay for 2 Mbs not for 1 Mbs! TOT upgraded all their 1 Mbs accounts ...

And that's exactly what I get from them ..... 1772 is almost 90% of what they promise me! Where to complain about? This

is exactly what they guarantee you.

Even international I get almost 80% ......

[ChiangMaiThai]

In all seriousness, is there anyone out there who can tell me the real reason that places like Singapore, S. Korea and Japan can have some of the fastest and most reliable internet in the world while in Thailand, one gets excited when a youtube video streams uninterrupted?

Along the same lines, why can all these countries offer 3G mobile services, while Thailand can only offer pretty handsets with no service to support?

Is it political, economic, technical or what?

[sniffdog]

You don't really want to compare Japan, South Korea and/or Singapore with Thailand? Why don't you try a comparison between Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar .... Seems more

real to me ... I bet you're results are in favor of Thailand ...

[ChiangMaiThai]

You don't really want to compare Japan, South Korea and/or Singapore with Thailand? Why don't you try a comparison between Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar .... Seems more

real to me ... I bet you're results are in favor of Thailand ...

Right, that tells me nothing at all.

Is it economic, political, technical or a combination and if so, then how so?

[bkk_mike]

You don't really want to compare Japan, South Korea and/or Singapore with Thailand? Why don't you try a comparison between Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar .... Seems more

real to me ... I bet you're results are in favor of Thailand ...

That would be like comparing the Internet in the US with the Internet in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

(If you combine the GDP of the four countries, Thailand's GDP is something like 90% of the total.)

The single biggest issue historically has been the complete and utter lack of international bandwidth.

i.e. Back in 2006, True had International bandwidth of 3.2Gbps (out of CAT's total at the time of 5Gbps), split between 400,000 true subscribers.

i.e. 8kbps per subscriber. (a seventh of the speed of dialup).

CAT's IIG may well be up to almost 15Gbps now, but even if True hadn't signed a single new subscriber in the last two years, they'd still be giving an average to each subscriber that is less than half the speed of a good old 56kbps dial-up connection.

It's no real wonder that the basic internet in Thailand is as bad as it is. In order to even get a 512kbps connection, you have to assume that less than 1 in 30 people is logged in (or is only browsing Thai sites). I'd be surprised if it's less than 1 in 30 people (who've paid for ADSL) using torrents, which means they're using bandwidth even while they're sleeping.

[percy2]

On the Gmail front , the last few days I have also had problems sending mail , solution was to use a different SMTP server.

I am now back to using the gmail SMTP server.

The answer seems to have been using the Captcha verification to unlock your account

I accidentally came across this and some other good advice here while finally figuring out how to have text , hyperlinks and images in a Thunderbird signature.

No I just need to figure out how to get rid of the --.

--

Cheers

[Dupont]

Not sure how it works.

I am trying to get the speedbit result to show.

I have 15 download and 9 upload.

Should have it done in a sec, min.

I am only a stones throw (now there's an idea) from their office and we get such crap services.

It worked!! If I print it out and send it through their window it will get their quicker than if I E_Mail it.... Suzuki Caribean permitting.

[Seizhin]

@Sniffdog:

What TOT Service are you on?

You seem to get a pretty reliable speed for Local and Internet.

MAxnet's Indy service (On a 1mb service)

Localnet's result is very satisfying.

However, as I dont really need localnets, I need the internet to be fast and this is what I got :

Horrible Ping, and this is when my internet's on top shape I dont know what I can do to improve this.

[ChiangMaiThai]

You don't really want to compare Japan, South Korea and/or Singapore with Thailand? Why don't you try a comparison between Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar .... Seems more

real to me ... I bet you're results are in favor of Thailand ...

That would be like comparing the Internet in the US with the Internet in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

(If you combine the GDP of the four countries, Thailand's GDP is something like 90% of the total.)

The single biggest issue historically has been the complete and utter lack of international bandwidth.

i.e. Back in 2006, True had International bandwidth of 3.2Gbps (out of CAT's total at the time of 5Gbps), split between 400,000 true subscribers.

i.e. 8kbps per subscriber. (a seventh of the speed of dialup).

CAT's IIG may well be up to almost 15Gbps now, but even if True hadn't signed a single new subscriber in the last two years, they'd still be giving an average to each subscriber that is less than half the speed of a good old 56kbps dial-up connection.

It's no real wonder that the basic internet in Thailand is as bad as it is. In order to even get a 512kbps connection, you have to assume that less than 1 in 30 people is logged in (or is only browsing Thai sites). I'd be surprised if it's less than 1 in 30 people (who've paid for ADSL) using torrents, which means they're using bandwidth even while they're sleeping.

What prevents Thailand from getting the international bandwidth? Is there not enough demand to support the investment or does someone in Thailand have a vested interest in the current crappy state of the Internet here?

[bkk_mike]

Speed-wise - I'm sort of getting what I'm overpaying for. Given that I have other things running in the background (VPN connection to London, etc, so my actual connection is faster than this)

Note that the ping time within Thailand is less than my ping time to California. (Suggests a misconfiguration somewhere).

[bkk_mike]

What prevents Thailand from getting the international bandwidth? Is there not enough demand to support the investment or does someone in Thailand have a vested interest in the current crappy state of the Internet here?

2 Gb in 2004, 5 Gb in 2006, almost 15 Gb now - it is going up - just not fast enough to cope.

Over the last few years you've had the increase in traffic from things like Youtube, Bittorrent and Skype, and in the future, downloads of HD movies, either legitimately (if you happen to have a US credit card), or illegitimately (the only option in much of the rest of the world, as the movie companies are typically American, and seem to forget that the rest of the world exists).

The main problem however, isn't the increase in bandwidth requirements, but that it's been a government department (CAT) that's been in charge of allocating new bandwidth. (And if government departments were any good at actually planning anything, the Russians would have won the cold war).

Also, as CAT had a monopoly on the bandwidth, they can make just as much money (if not more) by charging a lot for a little bandwidth, as they could from charging a normal price for a lot. So there was no real impetus on them to do a good job. (my own internet connection in London was 512K in 2004, and is 24Mb now, and costs half what I paid for 512K in 2004 - my connection in Thailand was 512K then, and is still 512K now, and still costs exactly the same as it cost in 2004).

Now that other companies can buy their own international bandwidth, CAT's effective stranglehold on things should be reduced, if only by the ISPs threatening to buy their own just to get a better price from CAT.

Personally, I just wish they'd let companies like Yahoo, or AOL into Thailand. They have global reputations to maintain (they operate in multiple countries already), so couldn't get away with the service that most of us are used to here.

[sniffdog]

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@Sniffdog:

What TOT Service are you on?

You seem to get a pretty reliable speed for Local and Internet.

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I am on TOT CybeGold 2mbs/512kbs

To be honest, this was sampled at 5am ....

Here are the results for 8:25pm (BKK)

[damole]

I'm on MAXNet premier 1Mbps and my modem reports

Line Rate - Upstream (Kbps): 512

Line Rate - Downstream (Kbps): 1024

yet Speedtest.net just produced the following:

So I ran a test at ThinkBroadband which produced a more realistic:

Date 28/03/08 17:06:22

Speed Down 526.17 Kbps ( 0.5 Mbps )

Speed Up 244.49 Kbps ( 0.2 Mbps )

[ChiangMaiThai]

I think all those speed tests are not reliable at all. Speedtest.net will tell me I've got a 1500kbps international connection, but it can't even manage to show me an uninterrupted youtube video unless it's 4am. I think that should be the real benchmark. Don't ask how fast your connection is, ask how long it takes to load a youtube video. As long as it stops and starts and stops again, we're still living in the dark ages here.

[bkk_mike]

I need to apologise for the original rant.

I swapped out my ADSL modem for a new Linksys one, and my problems disappeared. My Vonage is even working reliably.