Worth Upgrading From Tot 2 Meg?

[mca]

Basically I use my PC for downloading movies and music. I live about 15km outside of Khon Kaen city and on a good day (at about 6 am) with TOT 2 Meg I get about 140-160kB/s on a well seeded file downloading. I'm about 2 km from the "box" (for want of a better word) that serves my area.

Is there anybody out there in a similar position to me who has a better TOT package? Is it worth the upgrade to get better download speeds? The engineer said 2 Meg was the best package the system could handle in my area but I'd like some differing opinions.

Many thanks.

[noahvail]

I've got the ToT 2Mb plan also. When things were disgustingly slow, I had the techies come out to the house to verify the speeds, check modem, check the wiring, etc etc. Everything checked out fine, and on their laptop they were getting the same slow speeds. So they said I should upgrade to the 4 meg plan. We went round and round, me asking why should I pay even more when I'm not getting what I pay for now, and they responding it will go faster. Finally, they agreed to let me trial it for an hour. The switch got thrown at their main office, and...same speeds, even on their own computer. After 10 minutes I said ToT has failed, goodbye. So my guess is that your speeds would not improve.

I'm *still* trying to get my wife to call in CAT to test their products, but I live in hopes lol...

[mca]

Thanks for the input noahvail. Makes depressing reading seeing as I'm downloading a 45gig file at the mo.

[beano2274]

Remember download speeds can differ as some seeders do not let others upload at big speeds. On Utorrent you can download at whatever speed and limit your upload speed. I find most torrents are around 50k, but sometimes have been lucky with 140-150k.

I also have the 2Meg package from TOT including the free calls. But not in your area. No problems with it.

[nikster]

I have 3Meg and get 300KB/s downloads. Since 3MB is only 100 baht (?) more than 2, it's worth it.

In general, TOT will give you what they promised on parallel downloads such as torrents. That is if your torrent has plenty of seeders and not many leechers, you will get 2MB, 3MB or even 4MB. That's because you are downloading from many different seeders in parallel.

On single downloads, your mileage will vary. I sometimes get 160KB/s, sometimes 200KB/s, sometimes it's 30KB/s, and sometimes even less, depending on the time of the day and server location, as well as, I think, whether or not TOT has cached it. For those downloads where I only get a fraction of my 3MB, I am pretty sure it doesn't matter whether I have 3MB, 1MB, or 512KB. It's slow.

But yeah, for torrents it should make a difference. Tweak your upload to 40KB/s or so to get max. speeds. Torrents are a tricky beast - sometimes they go slow simply because the seed/leech ratio is bad, and because you're not uploading enough.

[rgs2001uk]

Thanks for the input noahvail. Makes depressing reading seeing as I'm downloading a 45gig file at the mo.

jeez, what the heck are you downloading?

45 gig is a heck of a size for a normal movie, must be a mini series I presume.

As other have mentioned torrents are a tricky beast at the best of times, coupled with peaks in computer usage in Thailand creating bottlenecks, usually after about 4 or 5 pm when schools knock off.

I tend to get best results after midnight.

[Pomthai]

http://speedtest.adslthailand.com/ Bangkok

http://speedtest.adslthailand.com/ Singapore

http://speedtest.adslthailand.com/ Hongkong

http://www.pingtest.net/ Bangkok

http://www.pingtest.net/ Tokyo

http://www.pingtest.net/ Kuala Lumpur

This is on TOT adsl 4mb service Phuket.

On a well seeded torrent I get 300-400KB per second most of the time and the upgrade is worth it. If you just want faster web browsing speeds and youtube etc I think you won't do any better than you do now with the 2mb service.

[mca]

Thanks for the input all. Greatly appreciated. I'll pop down the TOT office and see what the prices are like and if as stated they're not much more than I'm paying now I'll take the risk.

BTW. 45 gig file = Moms Teaching Teens site rip.