Maxnet Speed In Phuket - Could Use Some Help

Greetings,

I've been signed up for Maxnet indy for about a month. When I first got connected we had to have a tech come to the house. We had the 2mpbs package, but the tech said that we live too far from the switch (or whatever you call it) - apparently about 5 km, and that we would be better off with a 512 package, otherwise we would get continually disconnected. I'm pretty sure I saw her tweak some setting in the modem/router advanced setup settings, and then it started working ok for a while (consistently for a week or so downloading torrents was maxing out the 512 k bandwith - if that's what we really had). Then one day i woke up and modem settings had been wiped out. I had to reenter everything - static ip address for my computer that i had entered into the modem. after setting the modem up again, i was only getting 100 download speeds at best and usually around 30 or 40. we had the techs come out to the house again, and they told us that because of our distance we should expect erratic and poor performance.

I haven't come across a tech at maxnet who seems competent enough and speaks english well enough to convince me that the problem is distance, so i tried again this morning to contact a "senior tech". the guy i talked to said our password and username had expired, so we got a new one. he changed the TCP MTU setting from 0 to 1350 bytes. he also recommended the premium package, but said he would have to try and change something to do with the port and then get back to us tomorrow to see if we could use premium (if i understood him correctly). that was a couple of hours ago.

now i'm getting much better download rates - around 120, and for a while up to 320, but still not like before.

so.....

how much of an issue is my distance from the switch? if it really is 5 km, is that just too far for any kind of reliable and decent service? maybe i just need to try CAT, though i'd rather not fork out the 10K Baht for the hardware.

I've got the cheap hatari aa102 modem/router maxnet gave us. are there any settings i can tweak there? there are so many of them. i keep asking for someone at maxnet to go through them thoroughly with me, but the most i get is "please re-enter password and username".

any help/advise would be greatly appreciated.

Edited September 14, 200817 yr by kanpo