Ipstar Internet Satellite Service

[MattCinderey]

Is anyone out there using IPStar? If so, I was wondering what the service is like these days?

One of my clients was using it around 3-4 years ago and I remember it being very slow with high latency and disconnection problems when it rained.

Is it still the same? or has it improved now?

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Matt.

[wehugheog]

In general you would use a phone line (dial-up) to upload files and send requests for a page or whatever. This is slow.

When it rains and you have "disconnects" this usually means that or your dish is too small (small chance) or that your dish is not pointed directly at the satellite.

Because a satellite is far far away you WILL have relatively high latency, the signal can only go a certain speed and takes time to go up and down again from the satellite.

The pro is that usually when a download starts it will be very fast (depending on sat bandwidth).

If you want a truly stable satellite internet connection, well then we are talking $$$$

A direct satellite link from Thailand to i.e. Europe (which is possible with only 1 hop) would costs about 28.000 Euro per 6 Mbit line line full duplex per MONTH (this is a GOOD link, there is a lot of cr*p out there). Latency around 650ms. Then you need to add the 9 meter dish, the transceivers (not to forget a licence to broadcast at all in Thailand) etc. etc.

Hope this info helps.

[RKASA]

Sorry I don't have good news from here -

Mine stays up longer then UBC did or the Dtv dish does but any Sat will go out in heavy rain.

It is a two way connection no phone lines required.

As for slow - lately Mon to Fri day time (0800-1800/2000) is 80-100k and most secure connections i.e. banking etc about half dial up speed or 22kbps and can time out on you.

(only 2500baht a month for that)

The weekend is improved and I can get downloads running about 400k most the time, the secure connections stay slow but stay connected on the weekend.

Streaming video like youtube - totally forget about it - the ping is so high 1200-2000ms and an avg 2 min clip takes 10 mins to buffer if it even stays connected - get used to just waiting and then play back the temp files before you close the page - for some reason the best speed I get from any an all sites world wide is the same 65-80k. It is buffered or slowed by ToT. That is with windows or linux and any of 5 browsers I can use on each- plus have tried live sessions and fresh installs. It is just all you can get from ToT if it is a stream.

Option of CDMA is not working in our area and the lady across the street has a pile of worthless equipment she just bought a few months ago to prove it. It is the reason they have told us that ADSL is coming in a few months and we hope that unlike countless times in the past 11 years it is not just another lie.

Problem is not IpStar (it works great all the time and could give up to 4.7mb) it is the ISP (ToT) and the way they provide the service. During a promo for upgrade to 512k my connection was near perfect. The day it ended - bang - it dropped to what I just described. My first year which was contacted with a Viop phone was near perfect 256k on the internet and that dropped the day it ended also - so do the math. Note: the Viop I had with that for a year cost an extra 100baht a month and never worked even one time during the whole year - not one call was completed that ever had a connection that was usable.

and they call themselves a phone company - ha

So why don't I down grade to 256k - well because as in the past it would mean getting 40-50k Mon to Fri or half of everything I have now - Been there and done that and it is more proof that ToT just wants it that way.

My recommendation is be somewhere you can get ADSL make sure you are close to the Dslam and don't count on anything else. Most of it outside of Bangkok and few places is just a paper tiger and the excuses will out last you.

If given a choice I would never do any business with ToT ever again, /inst.prayer for choice/< be it IpStar or any other service - they have just not done the job in 5 years I have paid for and I don't see that changing.

Last Result: To Bangkok

Download Speed: 355 kbps (44.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 36 kbps (4.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Latency: 1135 ms

Sunday, October 17, 2010 1:17:52 PM

As you can see it is Sunday - and this is a 512/256 connection - if it were Mon????

[surayu]

Do whatever you can to get a normal wired connection using the standard telephone line, if that is not possible than go for it, do not get one of those fixed line from TOT which use a radio link, it would be a "TOTal" waste of money because no internet providers will give you an internet package on that, apart from the Dial Up connections which you can purchase in many places including 7/11, that's soooooo slow.

IpStar was good at the beginning, but then it become worse and worse, some days it disconnect every 60 seconds on average for about another minute or more, no rain in sight, then some other days it disconnect every hour or so(like today), during the installation the "technicians" failed to do the setup correctly and it was working at a fraction of the purchased speed, i spot that immediately and after a quick call to their call center to also mention their 2 professionals litterally runned away without fixing the problem, they got back and fixed the problem following the direction of somebody else using the phone (i guess was their manager or some other more knowledgeable entity), hope that helps....

[MattCinderey]

Thanks for the information. Very useful.

[TongueThaied]

Sorry I don't have good news from here -

Mine stays up longer then UBC did or the Dtv dish does but any Sat will go out in heavy rain.

I am out in the sticks -- no ADSL for me. I used Ipstar a few years ago, but it always timed out. Almost impossible to download a large file. Now I just use a Fox EDGE 700 aircard with a DTAC sim. I pay 199 baht per moth for 100 hours, which is more than I use. I just did a speed test at: http://speedtest.adslthailand.com/ The results were Ping: 797 ms; Download: 199 kbps ; Upload: 56 kbps. Almost the same as the Ipstar stats posted above, and it is always consistent and never times out on me. I have downloaded HUGE files overnight with no timeouts. As I said, I am way out in a village and probably do not share the cell tower with many Internet users. It may be slower in a populated area; I don't know. So while I grow old waiting for 3G, I have reduced my frustration level with this DTAC EDGE. And I am just sick that TOT has highjacked the 3G business.

[Farstanley]

I know this post is probably too late to be of any use but..

You Can get good service out of TOT

We live so far from Bangkok we're only five miles from Laos and they gave me a 4MB service when I moved here eighteen months ago. It was ****ing appalling.

All we could get out of them was excuses and invitations to use another ISP. The engineer calling and screwing up my wifi was the last straw.

I had my wife bug him on his mobile on a daily basis and she still bugs his successor even now, we went to the office and complained whenever he was less than polite, told them that I would swing for the bugger if he ever again got on my side of the horizon for talking to my wife like that, and on four occasions I gave the manager detailed written instructions on how to perk the DSLAM up, get the DNS working properly and refreshing regularly and everything else I could think of including the illegality of traffic shaping and bittorrent jamming, and generally convinced them I know more about their business than they do, had the gall to tell the manager he could fire the engineer and take me on at the same rate and service standards would consequently skyrocket, I telephone the call centre ( 1100 ) every time I get the slightest problem and go into considerable detail. The girls on option 9 can understand every technical term I throw at them and all this gets sent back to the local people who can't easil ignore their head office even if they don't always follow the technical stuff ( Hint: Call out of office hours ).

We still lose service when it rains, mainly because the rain shorts out the electricity supply, and sometimes for hours on end which is marginally excusable considering our location and they still occasionally invite us to move on but I get speed. It dropped a bit over the weekend and I rang 1100 this am. By lunchtime it was whizzing again.

For the last few months I have had 5 -7 MB. Sometimes the speedtest shows 20 - 50 MB and on one occasion 120.

[arcticman]

Lets just cut all the technical talk and get down to the basic whether the IPstar broadband service works or not. The simple answer is no. I live in an area in Samut Prakan where ToT is too lazy to be bothered about extending phone lines, so I ended up with IPstar in order to get connected to the Internet.

Ever since I started using this system, it has been a constant hassle to secure even a basic connection. I call the help centre on average every other day requesting them to reset the system. The problem is aggravated by the fact that the staff in charge with dealing with customers are in no way competent to do their job. I have received answers such as "It rained this morning so therefore it is not working." or "200kB is a very big file to download." or "Thailand has poor connection to overseas located web-sites". This represents the typical horse manure excuses often provided when people don't know what they are supposed to do. Lately, the tendency have been that they don't reply when calling customer service.

I have patently endured this service for the past 2 years and have now decided not to continue subscribing to this "service". Next week, I will hand in the box and invite them to come and collect their satellite dish. Instead, I will connect to the internet through my mobile phone. Although this solution is not much faster, at least I will manage to download a 200kB mail attachment - and I save the US$ 60 per month which ToT is demanding for a service they do not provide.

My advise to anyone who is considering IPstar in Thailand is "don't even think about it". It is a make-believe service in this Amazing fairy-tale country.

[Mosha]

I had it, it was both expensive and slow. About 3x what I pay now for a 6Mb connection. However I was in the sticks and had to wait for a line to be run up to the local school.