How Is The Internet In Chiang Mai?

[Tokay]

Thinking of spending a few months up there and looking for the best provider.

Thanks.

[gotlost]

All ISP's have their good and bad points it varies by location and time.

[preposterous]

True 6 / 1 at hillside condo 3, 599 baht/mth

[jkfkr]

True 6 / 1 at hillside condo 3, 599 baht/mth

This is at P & S Mansion 2 on Huay Kaew. During daytime the DL speed has been around 6,5 M the few times I have tested it.

[CMX]

Location, location, location. Everyone first asks neighbors. Promotions make price comparisons difficult, as, as an example, mine is no longer available.

Moreover, all providers are trying to oversell and it seems that some are succeeding.

Thus, their speed may vary with hours.

There are many threads discussing this subject in this city. Search function should reveal much.

Good luck,

[IanForbes]

Location, location, location. Everyone first asks neighbors. Promotions make price comparisons difficult, as, as an example, mine is no longer available.

Moreover, all providers are trying to oversell and it seems that some are succeeding.

Thus, their speed may vary with hours.

There are many threads discussing this subject in this city. Search function should reveal much.

Good luck,

True. Internet is very poor at my hotel even though it's supposed to be ADSL. It averages out to be the same speed as dial up was about 15 years ago in Canada. I live in the Wing Phing road area to the south of the inner city

The only advantage is my rent is low and the hotel is clean and safe. I can put up with intermittent, slow service because I'm not trying to run a business.

[bazmlb]

If you are only here for a few months then one that provides less than a 1 year contract will be the first thing to consider, maybe something like CAT's CDMA mifi router would suit you best.

[Tokay]

This is at P & S Mansion 2 on Huay Kaew. During daytime the DL speed has been around 6,5 M the few times I have tested it.

THAT is what I'm talking about!!!! That's as good as I had it back in the USA.

Is that for local speed or international?

[jkfkr]

This is at P & S Mansion 2 on Huay Kaew. During daytime the DL speed has been around 6,5 M the few times I have tested it.

THAT is what I'm talking about!!!! That's as good as I had it back in the USA.

Is that for local speed or international?

That's the standard Speedtest.net test from the servers in Bangkok if I understand correctly. The international downloads I've done have also been really fast.

Unfortunately I can't tell you anything more about this than the house, as this is the connection that came with the condo.

[Thighlander]

I am a cafe user. 7 hours for 60 THB. The sped is good. This particular place on Ratchipakani, the guy keeps the software up to date, and I haven't had any security issues or been accused of using an out of date browser. I don't like to travel with a computer, it's just something else to get stolen, dropped, or cause a delay at the gate. But now, most hotels have free WiFi, and it is really tempting, and the main reason is this. Some farang come in here with some of the worst body odor I have ever smelled. Do they have body odor like that when they are in their home countries?, dam_n, it would knock the buzzards off a manure cart. They are usually the ones that sit two to a computer and talk real loud. Hey, I like a good order of french fried, myself, but some of them smell like they used their GFs "sanitary towel" to wipe their rear ends, then used it as a towel to dry off, if in fact they ever do take showers. I noticed some of our fiends from "the Fatherland" have similar issues. It's 5-10 degrees cooler than it was a few months ago, and the BO problem seems to be twice as bad. A lot of them seem to be suffering from anemia and bad coughs, too. It must be the high season, again. The colored socks and tank-tops are back. Did that tattoo really cost more than your net worth?

[sfokevin]

The speed from your location to Bangkok is really not a good measure... NONE of the websites and streaming sites you normally surf/skype/stream to are located in Bangkok...

There is ALOT of false advertising done by all providers when it comes to your connection speed...

Try this test and choose a place you think best represents where you surf to...

http://www.pingtest.net/

Edited November 17, 2010 by sfokevin

[Ulysses G.]

3BB used to be somewhat acceptable, but lately it is terrible and especially starting from about 9 or 10 PM to 8 AM in the morning.

[orang37]

... snip ... body odor ...

Sawasdee Khrup, Khun Thighlander,

Could you be a little more graphic on exactly how that body odor smells ?

We got to the verge of nausea, when you wrote: "some of them smell like they used their GFs "sanitary towel" to wipe their rear ends, then used it as a towel to dry off, if in fact they ever do take showers," but something held the pyloric sphincter reversal reflex in check, and we were unable to quite attain "spew."

Perhaps imagery of "cesspools," or "necrophilia," might just do the trick ?

thanks, ~o:37;

Edited November 17, 2010 by orang37

[orang37]

This is at P & S Mansion 2 on Huay Kaew. During daytime the DL speed has been around 6,5 M the few times I have tested it.

Sawasdee Khrup, Khun JKFKR, you lucky high-flyer !

May we ask what you are paying for this service, and what download rates you observe when downloading whatever from the U.S. or Europe ?

thanks, ~o:37;

[orang37]

Sawasdee Khup, Khun Tokay,

In general we think your mileage will vary greatly depending on where you live, how your rental whatever is wired up to ADSL or whatever, how many people share the line, the physical distance between your cable, and the nearest consolidating router, the weather, etc. And the unknown infamous "TIT" factor that often turns "Amazing Thailand" into "Bummer Thailand"

fyi: We're using BBB (formerly MaxNet and part of TOT), with an 1160 baht per month connection. A few minutes ago, we could ping San Francisco in 40ms. (good), but could ping NY in > 200 ms. (bad).

Most international sites are coming through fine here, but some sluggishness, particularly weekend nights and Sunday night most of all (everybody's on-line ?).

After midnight, while downloading from the US or Europe, we can usually get speeds of > 400 kps. We use the excellent "Internet Download Manager" software (purchased direct from the company) which will, handily, shut down the computer when a download queue is finished.

Other than using DropBox to automatically synchronously archive important files to their free on-line storage, we don't upload that much. We don't mess around with Torrent and that stuff.

best, ~o:37;

Edited November 17, 2010 by orang37

[nikster]

fyi: We're using BBB (formerly MaxNet and part of TOT), with an 1160 baht per month connection. A few minutes ago, we could ping San Francisco in 40ms. (good), but could ping NY in > 200 ms. (bad).

FYI I am also using 3BB and they're cheating on the SF test. Try another, lesser known up the coast - Oregon, and you get to see more realistic values.

40ms is a giveaway as that's better than physically possible considering electrons moving in a cable at 2/3 the speed of light. Outrageous cheating on speedtest.net by 3BB.

Despite the cheating, I am actually getting my 8Mbit most of the time, whether it's downloading large system updates or bit torrent, so I am not complaining too much. Even YouTube seems to work just OK recently. Evenings are slow on 3BB, that's started a few months ago, unfortunately.

cheers.

Edited November 17, 2010 by nikster

[No1]

This is what I got now on speed to Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I have a 6 Mb/s line with TOT:

EDIT: Nikster, while I don't doubt that BBB is cheating, your calculation is revealing. Any idea how BBB can possibly cheat on speedtest.net?

Edited November 19, 2010 by No1

[sarahsbloke]

40ms is a giveaway as that's better than physically possible considering electrons moving in a cable at 2/3 the speed of light. Outrageous cheating on speedtest.net by 3BB.

I was under the impression the electrons in wires don't actually travel all the way.

More like a tube filled with ball bearings, push one in at one end, and a similar one pops out the other end ...........

But what do I know!

[No1]

I was under the impression the electrons in wires don't actually travel all the way.

More like a tube filled with ball bearings, push one in at one end, and a similar one pops out the other end ...........

That's a nice idea.

Nevertheless, electricity travels in a normal copper line at 96% of speed of light, in a coaxial cable still at 66%. I guess that's what nikster was referring to. Nevertheless, I would think that they are using fiber optic cables now and the speed of the transmission should be the nearest to speed of light. see http://www.tycotelec...=320&type=Press if you are interested.

[orang37]

Sawasdee Khrup Khun Nikster, Khun SarahsBloke, Khun Uno1,

A few responses to the technical aspects of internet reponse times on this thread:

1. you need to distinguish between the ultimate physically possible speed of movement of an electron (in a copper or whatever cable), and a photon (in a fiber-optic cable) from the speed of data movement in such cables in actual real-world conditions where signal-strength may be weakened due to "line noise," earth geo-magnetic flux conditions, weather, or sea-floor conditions, or even sunspots, and may need to be reinforced by repeating amplifiers.

To give a brief example: my connection to BBB is six kilometers from the consolidating router for the Wat Gate area: four years ago people much nearer that same router got significantly performance from what then was MaxNet/TOT than I did, and far fewer "dropped" connections. After our raising hel_l for four months, three kilometers of cable were replaced: performance was increased, number of outages decreased.

A year ago performance again increased when we had the phone line dis-connected, and the wire, once used for both phone and internet, used for internet only. However, there could be a number of reasonable hypotheses for this, the simplest being reduction of "line noise" or signal "bleed through."

2. PacNet, for example, which Khun No1 mentions, has a theoretical capcity of 4.8 terabits per second. That's capacity for data transmission, and what we are really discussing here is the speed of data transmission, not the laws of physics. Recently read that a new undersea cable was coming on-line for Asia with a 6+ terabyte capacity.

3. The internet is a complex technical protocol (wonderfully so !) genius designed system of organizing "stuff" (files, images, documents, whatever) into small packets, then identifying those packets uniquely, and then sending off the packets where each packet may travel a different route before finally reaching their destiation point and being re-assembled into the complete original message. The technical name for the underlying technical protocal is TCP/IP.

For a good "medium-geek" overview see: Ping and TraceRoute : of course, just Wikipedia on Ping, TraceRoute, TCP/IP to get a "geeklesser" POV.

4. Other protocols in wide use are POP3 for e-mail, and the very old USENET standard for certain "groups" referred to as "USENET Groups," like alt.support.cancer, for example: while most of these can be viewed, in indexed form, from the internet (via Google groups, for example), many of these USENET groups contain "pirate" stuff, and "porn" (attached binary files), and are not indexed by Google by corporate policy.

5. If you want to observe how communication might travel, via many servers, in many different countries from your computer: Google on TraceRoute, and learn how to use it, and keep in mind that each packet of your file or whatever may be going a different route.

6. While we agree that a ping of 40ms. from Chiang Mai to SF, or anywhere else outside Thailand, is highly improbable, we find Nikster's hypothesis that BBB is "cheating" very improbable.

If you use the ping facility mentioned here several times in a row on many destinations in the US you will get wildly varying results: it's not consistent. Instead, use : Speedtest.net which is available right here on the ThaiVisa top-level menu. To get a better idea of what your real world data transfer is liable to be like.

But the main reasons we would evaluate Nikster's hypothesis that BBB is "cheating" as highly improbable :

1. they're not that smart

2. there would be no significant commercial advantage to such shenannigans

3. it would be "expensive" technically to implement

Complicating the whole story of "response" time is the fact that many major companies, like Google, locate servers all over the world which "cache" (store updated duplicates) of frequently used web pages ... just as your computer browser caches many things (pictures, .html files, JavaScript code, cookies, etc.). So you might get a quick response from Google in Thailand but a very slow response from some small tech company in California.

In practice, you may find that certain software can speed up downloading large files: that's been our experience with the excellent program called "Internet Download Manager" we paid for several years ago, and which has been through at least twelve upgrades (all free !), and which integrates with all major browsers.

And the local configuration of your computer and its router or adsl modem, or whatever, and your operating system settings can all influence performance.

Since we have no experience with Torrent, perhaps someone else can comment in depth on the speed aspects of Torrent, and its protocols. One reason we don't use Torrrent is that by using it your computer becomes a server storing-and-forwarding ... i.e., sending out ... portions of files: and the history of that activity is recorded by your ISP. Would you feel comfortable knowing other people you don't know are exchanging possibly heavily encrypted files using your physical mailbox ?

In the meantime, suggest you use speedtest.net to measure your actual system's performance in uploading and downloading via the Internet, and expect results that vary wildly by time of day or night, your location, etc.

We congratulate Khun Nikster on his getting 8mb of download speed, although we'd like to know more about how he calculates that.

The key thing we think is good to keep in mind is that the Internet is dealing with fragments (packets), and they are all travelling helter-skelter: one packet may arrive at a server whose capacity (bandwidth) is about fully used: that sever will essentially put up a "red flag" that says "hold off sending me more packets:" meanwhile that server is looking around for other servers with "green flags" that say, in effect, "okay, I'm open for packets," so one of your packets may be slightly delayed in being forwarded : obviously your ISP cannot put back together the whole message/file until all the packets have been assembled and then decoded back into the file.

Constraints like these affect data transmission much more so than the laws of physics.

best, ~o:37;

Edited November 19, 2010 by orang37

[WhiteCadillac]

3bb premier has been a joke lately.

Latency in milliseconds has been around 500 ms to Bangkok today!

Disconnections like 3 times today.

This in Hang Dong, Nong Kwai, Night Safari area. I live near their dslam station suppsoedly, but no help. Terrible