Slow Internet: Particularly Using Thaivisa

[Richb2004v2]

My Internet connection is driving me mad! It is so temperamental. Some times it works almost well whilst other times it is anemically slow. It often seems that some sites load up fine and others just will not arrive. Thaivisa is particularly bad for some reason. With Thaivisa I often have to click several times to get the page to load, and some times it just will not load. I am on a broadband connection and having performed a speed test (using speakeasy.net) I seem to have a speed of 901kbps download and 268 upload. I regularly run AVG virus check and various spyware checkers. I have also tried turning off firewalls. I have three PCs and they all operate similarly, so I guess its my Internet provider. Is there anything else I should try?

[george]

Change your DNS to OpenDNS. Info http://www.opendns.org

What ISP and package are you using?

Is it slow both in Internet Explorer and Firefox?

[Foggy Bottom]

Change your DNS to OpenDNS. Info http://www.opendns.org

What ISP and package are you using?

Is it slow both in Internet Explorer and Firefox?

I am using TOT 2Mb Broadband and it has been terrible from here in Chiangmai for the last week or more. Last night it just completely gave up - when I queried the router, both ATM channels were down.

It's sort of back today but averaging 3-4 minutes per page load - all websites regardless of location outside of SE Asia - Thai Visa is taking 30-40 seconds to load per page.

Can't switch to OpenDNS due to have in-house LAN server with full DNS server etc already managing the LAN (full client server system setup, not peer-to-peer windoze)

Like the OP it's driving me nuts - web page edit and reconfigs that should take 30-60 minutes are taking 4-6 hours - I am losing a lot of revenue from this - my mood is also not helped by the fact this corner of Chiangmai City has had no piped water for two days ... and I smell

What I have also noticed is that since this service was installed 2 months ago, the overall speed has slowly but steadily degraded to where it is now - it was blisteringly fast at first.

Gaz

[digitaldoug]

I have been using TOT 2Mbit (goldcyber@..) for several years now. Before that, TT&t and IPSTAR.

I run mostly Ubuntu Linux. But I have many computers and routers.

My wife always uses WinXP. Downloads using a BitTorrent always run at modem (Dial-up) speeds 1..10 KBs (10..1000 Kbs) per second

because the clients are usually in the US. I converted to using openDNS when TOT had its last problem with

a big slowdown (maybe a month ago). "openDNS" helps a lot with "site not found errors", but not much when the

Internet is running "normally" (for Thailand). (DNS servers convert URLs to IP addresses and are used to find a page).

I am always amazed when my Ubuntu updates run at ~200KBs -- 2Mbs (full speed) because they come from a University

in Thailand and about 5..10KBs when they have to come from outside Asia. Sometimes Australia and India are faster

than the Dial-up speed of 5KBs.

I believe the primary problem with Internet speeds in Thailand is because of the "small" wire that connects

Thailand with the outside world.

I also believe this wire leads to Taiwan, then to the rest of the world.

Therefore Internet connections that go to US will be very slow (5..10KBs) no matter what ISP service

you use in Thailand.

I primarily use OpenDNS because a huge flaw in DNS Server software was found last year, by the

good guys. (This flaw was so big that a smart fellow could of taken over a DNS server in about 10 seconds,

I.E. the whole Internet could be his to play with ... your banking ... my life in my case).

Thailand DNS servers have not corrected their software yet and so far nobody has exploited this flaw ...yet.

DigitalDoug

[Crushdepth]

I've noticed a substantial decline is speed (and ping times) across a few different connections over the last couple of weeks. I think international access speeds are basically up the creek IMHO.

[lopburi3]

It is school vacation time - much higher internet usage when that happens - obviously internet it not primarily for study.

[George4]

I spoke to TOT about the problem and they said they were having problems last week with their international connection.

I tried a few speed tests and Hua Hin to London was completely dead for a couple of days while HH to Los Angeles was very slow but obtainable. Seems ok now though. By Tuesday it was ok again and I watched replays of the entire Cheltenham Festival on line, withoiut a glitch

I am in Hua Hin at the moment but live in Bangkok and have 3mb on both my computers. I am with True in Bagkok which I find much faster and a lot more reliable expecially when downloading movies etc.

With True I use a billion modem with TOT a D_Link modem. I discovered D-Link blocks ports but you can do portforwarding to overcome that. Also xp limits the amount of simultanious connections you can get to 10 but you can easily change that to 50. These two thing only seem to apply if you are using a p2p downloader like bit comet and as far as I know don't affect normal site visits. Their site tell you how to port forward and change the SC but getting info on the actual modem TOT use is really difficult. It's on the net but only a couple of sites. I ended up calling TOT who kindly gave me some assistance.

I've used modem booster for years which does help a little but not as much as it used to, now that the have improved the service. I run a test on my favourite website which seems to make it easy when I visit that particular site.

If you are having problems and they tell you it's not them, you are very likely needing to defrag your computer and check it for malware/spyware. Spybot and Adaware are free and if you don't have them or something similar you should install them immediately. They remove 95% of the crap you can pick up especially off porn sites. If you get pop ups on your desktop for some adverts as sure as hel_l you have a trojan/spyware.

A registry cleaner I find a must and use Registry Mechanic but there are others do the same job and I use diskeeper which defrags your comp automatically while running in ther background.

Another cause can be lack of free memory on your comp. Nowadays 2mb Ram is the norm but 1mb is ok. Anything less you should think of upgrading. Cheap as chips to do if your comp can be upgraded

There's a great site called pcpitstop which is used worldwide and recommended by just about everyone who knows computers. Don't even have to register and it scans your comp and tells you if anything is basically wrong like loads of temp files hidden on your comp etc. It does a bit of advertising for it's own products but just ignore them.

If you aren't sure of your comp spec there a free programme called Belarc it takes 1 minute to download and you can run it at anytime and look at everything you have on your comp. Gives you the amount of free memory you have the name of your motherboard video card etc etc. Also tell you if you are missing any critical downloads from Microsft.

Al the the above are spyware free and will give you years of trouble free computing if you use them regular. Amazingly I never had to buy any of them and they are all there if you know where to look

There are many reasons for slow connections and it's not always you ISP (Internet company) that's at fault.

Hope that helps someone

[artbottomup]

I've also noticed the very slow speed over the past 4 days. Prior to that, it was working fine especially at night. I'm out here in Isaan using TOT's 1mb connection via ipStar (no DSL avail in my village). It doesn sound like congestion & the bottleneck at the Thai servers.

[Richb2004v2]

When I use my linux laptop on an evening it is much much better. I don't know if thats because of the firefox on Linux or the time of day. My XP laptop during the day has almost ground to a halt when on Thaivisa.

[webfact]

From my own observations there are times a day where TV "hangs".

I suspect the culprit might be the involvement of certain Google services initiated during page load...

[Richb2004v2]

Change your DNS to OpenDNS. Info http://www.opendns.org

What ISP and package are you using?

Is it slow both in Internet Explorer and Firefox?

It still terrible. It takes an age sometimes to open a page on TV. Everything else is ok though. I have just had my laptop re-set to work well. What will loading the openDNS software do? I don't want to screw my machine up after having it sorted.

Thanks.

[monty]

Change your DNS to OpenDNS. Info http://www.opendns.org

What ISP and package are you using?

Is it slow both in Internet Explorer and Firefox?

It still terrible. It takes an age sometimes to open a page on TV. Everything else is ok though. I have just had my laptop re-set to work well. What will loading the openDNS software do? I don't want to screw my machine up after having it sorted.

Thanks.

You don't actually "load" open dns.

It's a setting you change in your system so it will resolves URL's from one of the biggest servers in the world as opposed of Maxnet's servers.

I have no issues at all at maxnet, at work I use Premier, at home Indy. The biggest difference is the latency, 60 msec on Premier, 800 msec on Indy, but apart from the less spiffy reaction time on hitting a link using Indy, all is working perfectly acceptable...

I'm not that far away from Ban Chang, so unless they serious local issues, not sure where your problem lies...

[robblok]

From my own observations there are times a day where TV "hangs".

I suspect the culprit might be the involvement of certain Google services initiated during page load...

Im pretty sure its the ads, i did a few tests with and without ads (there are programs for mozilla) and when i have the ads off no problems. After i have turned them on the problems begin again.

[RKASA]

When ever I have really bad days with TV,  I also seem to get it at few other sites that are doing the same, and they all have lots of googlesyndication in the page script.  When that starts hanging up it can slow the page.  The script for the page I opened just to post with has near twenty ref for google in it.  A bit over the top, TV should try to reel it in a bit.  Or turn the whole site over to google and be done with it. 

[basjke]

Change your DNS to OpenDNS. Info http://www.opendns.org

What ISP and package are you using?

Is it slow both in Internet Explorer and Firefox?

It still terrible. It takes an age sometimes to open a page on TV. Everything else is ok though. I have just had my laptop re-set to work well. What will loading the openDNS software do? I don't want to screw my machine up after having it sorted.

Thanks.

I had the same problem until 2 days ago.Opened a topic about but for some reason it was removed.

To make it short.I installed ad blocker and the problem was solved straight away.

[Crushdepth]

Thailand DNS servers have not corrected their software yet and so far nobody has exploited this flaw ...yet.

There's an interesting virus out that sets up a DHCP server and tries to hand out IP addresses to other computers on the network - as well as pointing them to compromised/bogus DNS servers. So be careful when you connect to a public hotspot - yet another reason to use OpenDNS. (Let's face it, DNS in Thailand tends to be busted, misconfigured or poisoned by the censors anyway so why would you want to use it).

From my own observations there are times a day where TV "hangs".

I suspect the culprit might be the involvement of certain Google services initiated during page load...

That's my experience also - I just had a couple of weeks where Thaivisa pages would 'stick' or never quite finish loading. It seemed to be the ads (and possibly the 'google analytics'?). But it is working fine for me today.