Slow Connection Phuket (letters)

[Buff-horns]

Why is ADSL so slooooow?

I have an ASDL Internet conection from Hi-Net (CAT), supposedly providing 2Mbit/sec service. Sometimes the connection is slower than a normal modem.

After I complained they told me the problem is that too many consumers are connected at the same point and that TT&T must solve the problem.

This was about five months ago and nothing has changed.

Are there any other providers I can go to, to get an ASDL connection that works? And why is a full speed connection in Thailand so expensive?

Tuesday, November 15, 2005 Frank Heise, Phuket

“This explanation is extracted from a from a column written by computer guru and Gazette columnist Woody Leonhard, published in May this year. Sadly, the conclusions he comes to are not encouraging.

For the past three weeks I’ve been regaling you with my experiences with running the 1,000-baht-a-month ADSL Internet lines from TOT (Cybergold) and TT&T (Hi-Net). Both government-sponsored services are supposed to operate at 1 million bits per second (1 Mbps) when downloading data into your computer, and 256 Kbps when you send data out.

Both TOT and TT&T have completely ineffective customer support. I’ve spent almost a month trying to get straightforward problems resolved with both of them, and to date I’ve come up with absolutely zip.

TT&T’s sporadically malfunctioning Domain Name Server, which occasionally bars me from getting to specific websites, continues to fail at times. The people at TT&T have been kind and responsive – but they haven’t solved the problem. The fact that the sporadic error may be indicative of DNS Cache poisoning and a hacker attack (as explained last week) doesn’t seem to faze anybody. I’m not sure anyone at TT&T has the slightest inkling what’s going on.

I’ve talked to TOT’s broadband people on the phone at least 20 times, and sent a handful of faxes. They still won’t give me an email address to contact them, so I have to re-explain my problem every time they (or I) call. Their most recent piece of advice was to change my modem – but they faxed me the instructions for the wrong modem. I still can’t get into any secure websites, such as Hotmail, amazon.com, any banking site, and so on.

TOT continues to insist that nobody else has reported the same problem, but I’ve heard from Gazette readers who say they can’t get to any secure sites with their TOT ADSL connections, either.

I feel confident in saying that Bangkok-based tech support for both TOT and TT&T broadband is, basically, clueless. After living in Phuket for four and a half years and working in the computer biz for 30 years, I’m certain this is a competence, not a language or cultural, problem.

On to the speed tests. If you run TT&T’s speed test (at www. tttbroadband.com) on a TT&T ADSL line, TT&T will tell you that your connection is blazingly fast. Cool. No doubt TOT has a similar speed test squirreled away somewhere. I completely ignored those tests, of course, and instead relied on an industry standard ADSL test, measuring upload and download speeds from a server in Seattle that’s connected directly to the Internet backbone. You can read about the test and its limitations at www.dslreports.com/stest?loc =97.

The results in the graph shown are not definitive. There was no attempt to be statistically accurate, to adjust for outlying data or to construct proper sampling regimens. These are the raw results of 90 tests, taken on the same computer, with standard Windows XP SP2 settings, at different times between April 24 and May 16.

The TOT line went down a half-dozen times during the tests. The TT&T line went down, too, but not nearly as often. TT&T generally gave out at the same time as the TOT line, which probably means that all ADSL communication with Phuket broke down at those points. Reliability is still a problem.

Both TOT and TT&T advertise 1 Mbps service for 1,000 baht a month. In the morning, TT&T comes close to living up to its billing; TOT doesn’t even deliver half of what they say they offer. By noon, TOT’s speed, on average, isn’t much faster than a dial-up modem – and it stays that way for the rest of the day. TT&T’s speed in the afternoon and evening is about twice that of TOT – which isn’t saying much. I found that weekends were only a little faster than weekdays, and that TOT, in particular, is slower now than when I started testing, and it’s getting worse.

The fundamental problem is obvious. TOT and TT&T are offering cheap ADSL service, knowing full well that they don’t have the hardware to support it. In most countries that would be called “fraud.” In Thailand, however, there might be another name for it. Consumers look at the TOT and TT&T 1 Mbps offerings, and they can’t understand why the government’s competitors charge five or six times as much for the same service. Now we all know how TOT and TT&T can charge so little.

I promised I would tell you about the third problem with ADSL service in Phuket. Here it is: TOT and TT&T’s service is laughably slow. In South Korea, everybody gets full 8 Mbps Internet access, all the time, for the same price that we pay in Phuket for one-hundredth of that capacity. Hong Kong, too. Singapore isn’t quite that fast, in general, but it’s close. Anybody who tells you that Phuket is an IT City is pulling the wool over your eyes, Governor. We don’t have a good Internet connection. Never have had.

Until Phuket has reliable, cheap, fast Internet access, we can’t even begin to compete with other regions in Asia, much less with the rest of the world. Anyone who thinks they can telecommute from Phuket need only sit down at any Internet café, anywhere on the island, and give ADSL a try ”

Tuesday, November 15, 2005 Phuket Gazette