Cat Cdma Sucks

[phuketrichard]

been dealkin gwiht thius over 2 months, the speeds for my cdma here in Kamala have been steadliy going downhill.

Called them the other day and talked with the lady who then got the guy in Surat thanion the line. He =chekd my spped and ( speaking in thai) told the cusutomer service my speed was 150 download. ( she then told me in engliosh the fault was my computer LOL thinking i did not undersdtand Thai

told me to bring my laptop in so they could check my settings

so then for fun i ran some tests using speakesasy sf

march 25th

6:45 am 1041 down, 250 up

8:15 895 down 409 up

8:45 526 down 480 up

11:00 325 down 450 up

1 pm 390 down 450 up

2:20 210 down 467 up

4:30 429 down 393 up

5:30 310 down 512 up

7:00 320 dwon 197 up

9:10 360 down 440 up

it is obvious that they have oversubscribed and bandwidth is just not there.

Today the CAT tech guy came tomy hoiuse with his laptop and tested speeds using speakeasy.net sf

he got 210 down 440 up

then he tested using his speed test for bangkok and got 260 down 320 up

He said he will send hi rpeort into Bangkok as if that will do me any good.

So for anyone thinkin gof buying the cat card and using cat DONT!!!

When will thailand start thinking about cusutomer service? ( i will answer that) when they can make $$ off of it not before

[osmond]

Agreed. Up here in Chiang Rai the performance has been going steadily downhill over the past 3-4 weeks, to the point where even the speedtests are not starting ( latency errors ).

I use http://speedtest.or.th/ as the first step as that is what CAT suggested. Usually that works and used as a baseline.

Then Thaivisa Bangkok / Singapore and finally speedtest.net to USA West & Esat Coast / UK. Along with screen snapshots from bandwidth monitor demonstrates that CAT CDMA ,as you say, has totally inadequate bandwidth to meet basic demands and hasn't quite got the traffic shaping right either.

I have assembled a set of stats to present to the local CAT office which in the past, has on occasions, brought some results in the right direction believe it or not !!

Today speed and performance here today is particularly dreadful, and over the past week frequent DNS timeouts add to the misery.

A trip to CAT office scheduled this week, armed with the evidence, yet again.

[CharlieH]

Totally Agree Sucks big time, but they couldnt careless, been into the office and they always try and fob you off with some nonsense and carry on reading their magazines etc, they are just NOT interested in what the customer has to say. They only want the money. They advertise/,promote and have quite clearly over subscribed and will continue to do so because that seems to be "the Thai way " with everything, just keep taking the money no matter what crap service the customer actually ends up with.

The service here (Central North) has been going downhill for over 6 months, dramatically worse since the schools have been closed, with many kids who would normally be in schoool probably using the net for entertainment and its just clogged up. As the saying goes "This is Thailand" and for those of us who live out from the city a little and more than 100 metres from a main road we have NO choice but to suck it up!

[CharlieH]

duplicate, sorry dont know what happened.

Edited March 28, 2011 by CharlieH

[4evermaat]

I've noticed for the past 2 weeks or so, cat CDMA has been slower than usual. So I did test at http://speedtest1.totbb.net/ and then http://speedtest.or.th/ . I'm getting 0.6-0.8 Mbps down and 0.2-0.3 up.

I didn't want to play the victim role and decided to march into the CAT CDMA office. The first man directed my GF to call two different support cell phone numbers for technicians that could help test. Then the first man turns to a lady that appears to be boss or supervisor and she practically shruggs her shoulders and my girlfriend says basically to wait for the tech people to call us back. I brought everything with me (laptop, mifi device, receipt of last payment, etc) so I decided to run a speed test there also, I was getting the same speeds.

Then the lady that speaks english comes in that I remember from before. I review the issue with her; she tells me they do not service there. Call the call center. 1322 (?) Then she goes a step further, bringing her landline phone to the counter and dialing it for me. Clearly she wanted ME to deal with it, she avoided me when I pointed to the phone. The lady on the phone was....well. She answered the phone, does that count? The phone representative tried to convince me that the speed is normal if service is busy. I told her that this is an ongoing issue, not just for a couple of hours of downtime. She finally took my numbers and said technician will call me back "soon".

After hanging up, the english speaking CAT lady said that it was better to call the call center and make a record of the issue and they will call back within 10 days, but usually much quicker. She also commented that the major operations are in Surat Thani; they have very little technician in Chumphon provence. Although I try not to make assumptions, the look on her face suggested that she did not want to speak with the CAT call center. In fact, no one wanted to get involved to help resolve the issue. This was different than the other issue I had a few weeks earlier, where she calls the phuket office to confirm the account was current (the whole separation of province thing she couldn't pull up correct information on her computer). Well, at least it wasn't my cell phone minutes being burned .

what speeds should I be getting? I've gotten 2.8-3.0 Mbps down on the speedtest before for CAT. I was checking it at the same time that I was testing TOT (which so far has been great as long as I keep router on default settings from TOT)

Today I'm getting 1.1 Mbps down on the test, but I only tested it once today about 30 minutes before writing this post. I want to confirm with one or two local farangs that they are having similar issues.

We'll see what happens.

Edited April 6, 2011 by 4evermaat

[likewise]

same story for Krabi, CAT CDMA speed decreased drastically, but as we all know there is very little choice and the other providers aren't doing much better.

[4evermaat]

same story for Krabi, CAT CDMA speed decreased drastically, but as we all know there is very little choice and the other providers aren't doing much better.

There is a partial solution: seedbox or cheap dedicated server to download. I also know True 3g has expanded in the south near phuket. Maybe they hit krabi?

Well, they did call me on monday or tuesday this week to follow up with my request for technician check. Turns out the technician did not visit my house personally, but supposibly ran tests on the nearby tower. Everything seems to be working ok. It is normal to have 0.7-0.9 Mbps, especially if there are many people using simultaneously.

Then, almost perfect timing a new issue: the tower is out in Pathio (chumphon), so I haven't had any access in 2 days now. I called for the second time today and they admitted there is a server or tower problem, first in Samui, but now maybe they realize it is in Pathio as well. When they answered the phone, the lady knew my name and was already aware something was wrong.

I have to be honest, the CAT service has gotten SLOWER, but never has it been out for an extended period of time. (only if power is out, and the power must be out for a long time before the internet stops working)

I knew I got TOT as a backup for a reason. The only time they do not work is if power dies. But I see the seedbox thing as being a viable alternative for downloading large files. Basically you download to the seedbox which can be left unattended. Then once the file is complete, download via http or ftp to your computer. You could use a sync program so that you could automatically download new files at predetermined time. It was after CAT went down that I finally decided to try the seedbox idea.

Tot was only down once, and it was for a few hours after a power outage. It's been pretty solid for me otherwise.

[dollarman]

Cat Cdma has gotten a lot worse in Chalong, Phuket the last 3-4 months. I think this is due to high season, hence for subscribers.. Speed is slow and it is beginning to become unreliable too. Sometimes it will show no signal aslo, and I have to disconnect and connect it again to get it to work.

[czGLoRy]

wow.. I have never seen speeds that high with CAT CDMA. I get about 25 kbps download and really bad upload.. and its down constantly. When it works it is fairly stable in terms of disconnecing in Chaing Mai at least.

[bangkokcitylimits]

don't understand your english either.