Cat Hi Speed - Is It Practical For Downloads

[michaelcallan123]

I'm looking at CAT mobile hi speed using the "C-motech CCU-650" USB Modem. Moved to Thailand (Songkhla, South) a few months ago - living with a friend, intend moving to a rented place and building a house - hence no landline for about 2 years. So CAT seems to be an option .....

But what's the *real* speed like (not what the CAT blurb says of 500-800kbps)? Is it practical for music and film downloads (using bit torrents etc.). Is it consistent?

Any practical expereinces or advice much appeciated.

[Canuk_Al]

Hello;

I am using the exact modem for Internet access, I live in Tak about 225km south of Chiang Mai or about 500km north of Bangkok! I have had the modem for about one week now, I get a lot of disconnects with this modem, some requiring a hard reboot to get it working again. Other disconnects only require restarting the modem software!

Regarding speed the numbers are over stated like everything sold here, the speed that I get runs between 250 to 480 kbps depending on traffic. Video transfer is very slow, downloads are medium slow with disconnects being a point of frustration.

I had two choices where I live, dial up or this wireless modem. This is much faster than dial up!

I have been told that CAT will be upgrading their network here in Tak shortly but I have heard these sort of things for years.

Good Luck!

[nikster]

It depends. I believe it's mostly about signal strength, in crowded areas probably also about how many other people are using it.

It works fantastically well for me in the north, I had downloads come in with 160KB/s using a download accelerator. And regular speeds of 70KB/s or 600Kbit are normal.

But now I am using it in Samui and it's often dead slow with 5KB/s. Max. I got in Samui was 60KB/s which is about 500Kbit - all "international", I never use any Thai websites and so that doesn't count for me at all.

One thing to consider is that upload rate is very slow, 50 - 100Kbit/s. That's part of the standard EV-DO and not CAT's fault, so there is pretty much nothing you can do. It means that Bittorrent will not work well at all - only if there are many more seeders than leechers, basically. In a 50/50 situation or peer to peer bittorrent will max. out with your upload rate, and that's simply very slow with CAT CDMA.

So there's a few factors to consider:

- Location has a huge effect on download speed. Try before you buy.

- Uploads are bad no matter where you are. No problem for web surfing or email but not good for bittorrent or uploading movies to YouTube. BTW YouTube downloads are much better on CAT than on anything else - I am not sure why, but I think CAT is not using bandwidth-shaping whereas all others intentionally slow down YouTube to a crawl to save bandwidth. They'd have a class action lawsuit by now if they were in the USA, but in Thailand anything goes...

- Lag is higher than with DSL.

If you can, get DSL. You can buy a landline from a neighbor, stretch the DSL limit somewhat to 5km from the base station. If you can't get DSL, CAT CDMA is your best option until next year when DTAC and AIS will be introducing 3G technologies...

Edited April 9, 2008 by nikster

[Upcountry]

Hey folks,

I have TTT/Maxnet in central Thailand. BitTorrent used to work okay, though email would sometimes be unusable (via client to POP/SMTP). Streaming like YouTube was a frustrating experience.

But for the last few weeks "youtube" and email works very well. The problem for me is that BitTorrent/FTP, etc., has slowed to crawl... make that creep ... except very late at night.

Since (as I have heard) TTT uses satellite instead of CAT, the are probably under more pressure to protect users from the bandwidth demands of P2P users. I used to curse the gamers when I used dial up a few years ago, so I don't blame them too much, but I think they have gone overboard. I can't even keep a ratio on a very good tracker I use.

I'm thinking about moving to TOT (means new phone number, etc.), but I want to be really sure it will make a serious difference and won't at the same time cause email problems. I can live without most streaming video.

Any thoughts?

UC

[michaelcallan123]

Thanks, nikster. What's a "download accelerator"? And where do get one to try it out?

[nikster]

Thanks, nikster. What's a "download accelerator"? And where do get one to try it out?

Windows: Flashget (free)

Mac: iGetter (free), Speed Download (free trial)

There's tons of others on Windows as well, and I hear from the forums there are better ones than Flashget but I am not using Windows anymore so you'll have to scan the forums for those. No links, use Google to find 'em.

How does it work? Very simple - instead of opening a single download connection to a server, it opens 5 or 6 in parallel, and downloads bits and pieces of the file in parallel. Why should that be faster? Because the way ISPs allocate bandwidth. They'll not allow you to have a single download link go over 30KB/s even if you have a 2Mbit line, for example. So if you download the file in a single connection, it's limited to 30KB/s but if you open 6 in parallel, you get a total of 180KB/s (ideally).

I also like download accelerators because they provide bullet-proof downloading. If your connection is interrupted, they can continue when it's back up, and so on. Firefox / Safari allow you to do that too but it doesn't work nearly as well and I found myself often downloading the same file X number of times because of network interruptions.

[michaelcallan123]

Still learning this download stuff!

Is Flashget or the like ('Download Accelerators') the same as or similar to BitTorrent client like BitLord, uTorrent & Azureus? Or are they something like an add-on to those torrent programs?

Thanks.