Wi-fi In Bkk Condo

[scorecard]

I'm on the owners committee of my condo located in central Bangkok and we are thinking of installing a building wide wi-fi facility.

If your condo already has this facility would you please share some details. Specially interested to know:

- How the condo owners get access. Is it set-up so that each owner gets a personal username and password just one time? ,

- If so, how do you actually pay? Is it added to your internal monthly maintenance account paid to your juristic office? And how much?

- Or, do the owners have to buy a new username and password each 100 hours or perhaps every 30 days or something similar?

- Was there an initial set up fee shared by all owners to initially install the system

- Did it take long to install?

- What provider is it?

- Is the speed / strength etc., poor / OK / good / very good, excellent etc?

Any other comments you'd like to share of course very much appreciated.

[mjperry]

Hi,

I'm not on any owners committee or anything for the condo building I live in, just a user of the new Wi-Fi system they have installed recently. But it is really top notch, gave up my 2Mb TOT DSL line to use the Wi-Fi. It was all installed and is managed by the company who installed it Wide. Their at http://www.wide.me. In our building you can either sign up through the juristic office or direct from the company. They even offer a free 7-day trial of the service to see what its like.

Hope thats of some use to you,

Martin

EDIT: I have their MD's email address if you wanted a contact to speak to there PM me for it if you want, I was speaking with him as I have a slightly more complex than usual setup in my condo thanks to being an IT professional and he helped me get it all set-up great.

Edited July 17, 2009 by mjperry

[zaphodbeeblebrox]

I hate Wi-Fi. It's totally unreliable. Give me DSL anyday.

[jerrylee]

I'm on the owners committee of my condo located in central Bangkok and we are thinking of installing a building wide wi-fi facility.

If your condo already has this facility would you please share some details. Specially interested to know:

- How the condo owners get access. Is it set-up so that each owner gets a personal username and password just one time? ,

- If so, how do you actually pay? Is it added to your internal monthly maintenance account paid to your juristic office? And how much?

- Or, do the owners have to buy a new username and password each 100 hours or perhaps every 30 days or something similar?

- Was there an initial set up fee shared by all owners to initially install the system

- Did it take long to install?

- What provider is it?

- Is the speed / strength etc., poor / OK / good / very good, excellent etc?

Any other comments you'd like to share of course very much appreciated.

Hotels have building wide wifi and have to invest in a big bunch of hardwares upfront, they can charge several hundred baht for a day's use - as the guest have no option (in the room), in a condo I'll rather have my own private access.

[thaiphoon]

I hate Wi-Fi. It's totally unreliable. Give me DSL anyday.

Maybe you have just had a bad experience; I live by it.

[AnaisNin]

My condo have free WiFi. But it is very slow, because too many Farang log on to ThaiVisa at the same time.

[monty]

Biggest problem with condo wide wifi, is that it is a shared media.

The supplier will still have to buy his bandwidth from another ISP. As I think the fastest connection you can get in Bkk is 8 Mbps, you can quickly see if you share that between 40 condo units ot many people would need to have a full speed download going to make the connection grind to a halt...

And that is if there are really 8 Mbps coming through the pipe, which it will seldom do...

So mostly it will work well initially, but will start to slow down when more people subscribe!

[balo]

I'm very satisfied with the WiFI internet line in my apartment building , http://www.aiyaresidence.com/

We have a D-link access point installled in every floor connected to a D-link router in the reception. So it gives good signals everywhere. I talked to some of the other guests and they have no problems.

I pay 500 Baht for a month , I have to login every day with the same username and password.

[RKASA]

Don't do it. Should have wired it right in the first place.  The condo is not an ISP and almost everyone that has this is ripped off.  Get the ISP into the building and to each unit.   Each unit can get a real account if they want internet.  If they built the building properly its easy to do. The cheap  a's should have done that in the first place.  Pennies saved a dollars wasted.  Plus, the condo won't have to hear about the internet problems each tenet is going to have anyway.  Also if you want or need to forward a port or something you can't because you don't even have a real internet connection.  It may be someone is thinking about making some extra money off the renters, but all your going to do in most cases is get them pissed off.  Not that most businesses in Thailand would even give a rat about that anyway.

[mjperry]

Biggest problem with condo wide wifi, is that it is a shared media.

The supplier will still have to buy his bandwidth from another ISP. As I think the fastest connection you can get in Bkk is 8 Mbps, you can quickly see if you share that between 40 condo units ot many people would need to have a full speed download going to make the connection grind to a halt...

And that is if there are really 8 Mbps coming through the pipe, which it will seldom do...

So mostly it will work well initially, but will start to slow down when more people subscribe!

That's not right, the biggest connection in BKK is 8Mbps, sure, to consumers. Companies that do this right wouldn't install a consumer DSL line and then share that out to everybody. The provider in our building has installed a high speed leased line probably at somewhere in the region of 155Mbps to support the number of units in our condo building and each customer gets traffic shaped to a rate of 3Mbps/1Mbps up or 4Mbps down/2Mbps up depending how much you want to pay each month 590 or 790 Baht respectively.

[pkspeaker]

They have that setup in 2 places i've stayed at, one is Oriental Suite in bangkok and another similar service apartment in pattaya, where they have the wireless routers in the hallways on each floor, and the buildings are about 8 or 12 floors.. in both cases the system worked well, i was able to use the internet and listen to radio from the internet and youtube with good performance.. best way to do it is just give the users the universal key, rather than setting up a complicated username/password system (like they have at ibus and other hotels where you are presented with a login screen after the unsercured router lets anyone log on, only to be presented with a loginscreen that turns into a minimized timed window after you log in witha purchased name/password card..

To keep nearby outsiders from siphoning free internet service, simply change the universal key every month or so and place the current key in the tenants mailboxes. doing it that way keeps service lowmaitenence and keeps you out of the isp business..

[monty]

Biggest problem with condo wide wifi, is that it is a shared media.

The supplier will still have to buy his bandwidth from another ISP. As I think the fastest connection you can get in Bkk is 8 Mbps, you can quickly see if you share that between 40 condo units ot many people would need to have a full speed download going to make the connection grind to a halt...

And that is if there are really 8 Mbps coming through the pipe, which it will seldom do...

So mostly it will work well initially, but will start to slow down when more people subscribe!

That's not right, the biggest connection in BKK is 8Mbps, sure, to consumers. Companies that do this right wouldn't install a consumer DSL line and then share that out to everybody. The provider in our building has installed a high speed leased line probably at somewhere in the region of 155Mbps to support the number of units in our condo building and each customer gets traffic shaped to a rate of 3Mbps/1Mbps up or 4Mbps down/2Mbps up depending how much you want to pay each month 590 or 790 Baht respectively.

Huh??? 155 Mbps???

A 6 Mbps corporate line (which means you actually might get 6Mbps and not 1 Mbps internationally) costs currently 27,500 Baht/month.

At 590 Baht/month for 3Mbps, they would need 45 customers to break even on their bandwidth expense. They would also need to make a profit, so call it 60 subscribers.

60 subscribers getting 3Mbps, out of an available 6 Mbps means a 30:1 sharing ratio. Probably on par with the worst el cheapo cinsumer package you can get and of wich you see massive amounts of posts over here in Thai Visa that it ain't working properly!

A 155 Mbps leased line with full international access will cost several hundred thousand Baht/month. I think on big pipes from the main IIG's you'll probably pay around 3000 Baht/Mbps. Your 155 Mbps would come in at a cool half million a month!

With 500 subscribers their revenue would not even come close to covering their expenses!

There is, of today, not one ISP which is able to sell a quality good performing 3Mbps internet connection for 590 Baht/month. And they have economy of scale on their side when buying bandwidth...

So I can assure you a small player will not be able to do better.

[mjperry]

Huh??? 155 Mbps???

A 6 Mbps corporate line (which means you actually might get 6Mbps and not 1 Mbps internationally) costs currently 27,500 Baht/month.

At 590 Baht/month for 3Mbps, they would need 45 customers to break even on their bandwidth expense. They would also need to make a profit, so call it 60 subscribers.

60 subscribers getting 3Mbps, out of an available 6 Mbps means a 30:1 sharing ratio. Probably on par with the worst el cheapo cinsumer package you can get and of wich you see massive amounts of posts over here in Thai Visa that it ain't working properly!

A 155 Mbps leased line with full international access will cost several hundred thousand Baht/month. I think on big pipes from the main IIG's you'll probably pay around 3000 Baht/Mbps. Your 155 Mbps would come in at a cool half million a month!

With 500 subscribers their revenue would not even come close to covering their expenses!

There is, of today, not one ISP which is able to sell a quality good performing 3Mbps internet connection for 590 Baht/month. And they have economy of scale on their side when buying bandwidth...

So I can assure you a small player will not be able to do better.

Your still thinking like a consumer, albeit a corporate consumer. These guys install their own dark fiber into the building going to wherever their local PoP might be so they can run whatever speed they want over it the most likely being 155Mbps ATM but could be 100Mbps Fast Ethernet. In a more regulated place like the UK or US you can't just go around pulling fiber cables but in a country like Thailand where with the right backhander or secret handshake involved they can probably have their own couple of somchais pull the fiber along Sukhumvit to wherever they need it to go, hence why the cabling you see is an utter disgrace here I imagine. From their PoP they already have the peering agreements with other Thai ISP's and they use the True International gateway to get out to the rest of the world, my speed tests using speedtest.net showed excellent results both within Thailand as well as to Singapore, UK and the US, I posted them in the thread i started when I first got the service here http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Wide-Wireles...et-t277041.html

[monty]

I do hope the best for you, but as I can see from the other thread they are just 19 days after launching...

Actually what I'm trying to convey is not about who puts the pipe into the building, nor where it comes from, nor how big it is or what medium it uses.

What I'm trying to say, is that even for an ISP, international bandwidth costs them around 3000 Baht/Mbps/month.

So it does not matter if your operator has peering agreements with a bunch of ISP's, in the end it'll cost them 3000 Baht/month for every Mbps to the outside world.

Mind you, this has come down from around 20,000 Baht/Mbps/month just over 2 years ago when CAT still had the monopoly on international bandwidth!

And of course, you do not need to give consumers a non shared pipe to the outside world. Is never done, anywhere in the world!

But again, in this "contention ratio" case, the scale of the operation will decide how stable the speeds will be.

On ISP level, with your package you share for example 10:1 on international bandwidth. But the bandwidth is not just shared between the 10 consumers on your node. Bandwidth is also shared between the different nodes. Nationwide. So your node, if heavily used, can be getting double or more the normally assigned bandwidth IF somewhere else is a node which is loaded less then what is assigned to it. Only when all nodes are loaded to the max, overall speeds start to drop...

So nationwide that's a whole lot of nodes which are constantly being balanced out to give each node and their attached consumers as much as possible bandwidth.

On a smaller scale, it will depend how big the company is which is supplying the system. If they have just a few condo's hooked up, then they do not have much other nodes to take bandwidth and route it to your condo if load is high there.

In the end, the ISP game is a bit gambling on how the ratio will be between "heavy" users and "light" users. Because it is this ratio which will dictate the ultimate sharing ratio of available bandwidth.

And at 590 Baht for 3 Mbps, they are looking at an avareged out sharing ratio of 15:1, without any profit margin. Count in their profit (and the fact they have to recoup investments as well) and you're probably looking at a sharing ratio of 25:1.

And my experience tells me a smallish operation cannot sustain stable speeds in the long run on this sharing ratio, not with how consumers are using the internet today.

Actually they could, but then they would need to completely block p2p and bittorent stuff, stopping people from hugging their bandwidth to the max 24/7.

Even premium packages of major ISP's which use a sharing ratio of 5:1 are struggling to keep up with the way users are using the internet nowadays...

And mind you, even the big ISP's have not even managed to get their load balancing stuff worked out. To many stories on how 1 consumer on a certain package easily gets full line speed, while another a few km away is getting virtually nothing on exactly the same package.

This should not happen. Either their main fiber grid is laid out improperly for the amount of people attached, but more likely, they simply lack the know how to properly set their systems up. These speed differences can happen between consumers living just meters away!