Fibre To The Home Iin Rural Issan

[thaimite]

Just thought I would share a small success story with you guys.

For several years I have depended on CAT and their EVDO CDMA network. Not brilliant, but OK for my needs apart from the lack of a real IP address which meant no port forwardng for torrents and no FTP from my server..

Anyway, now that the CAT CDMA option has been closed I had to find an alternative, and although 3G held great promise I was not keen on the data capping and again the lack of a public IP address

My house is in the middle of nowhere but admittedly not far from a major highway so I did not feel there was much hope for anything else.

I sent the wife out to ask about various connection options with no luck and again TOT stated there was no way they could give us a phone line. However on her 2nd visit when she impressed upon them how hard I am to live with without my daily "internet fix" they suggested that they could give me fibre to the home for Internet, but no telephone. (I never wanted a phone line anyway)

So to cut a long story short, a week later I have a Fibre link connection up and running at 10Mb which is the minimum speed option and I have a public IP address, so I can have unrestricted remote access. On my first day of real use it seems to be working very well.

It took two teams to install, the first one bringing the fibre connection in to the house alongside the power lines and doing the terminations. The 2nd team, tested the link and set up a basic Linksys router (since replaced by a better unit I had avaiable).

The installation cost was quite steep at 40K baht, but the monthly fee at 1,500Baht approx is a lot less than I used to pay for an almost unusable IPstar connection so I am Very happy.

The Moral of the story is just because you cannot have a phone line to the house do not assume that there is no Internet option. Ask specifically about a fibre link.

[mamypoko]

Internet in the, as you say, in the middle of nowhere, is a true success story.

Let us know how it is performing as time goes by.

Congrats!!!

[davejones]

Well done. Just goes to show that anything is possible in Thailand. All you have to do is make it happen.

[Clear Sky]

That's great, thaimite I will be living in Issan in the future and your experience has given me hope that I don't necessarily have to be without a decent internet connection. To which town and highway are you closest?

Thanks for posting.

[h90]

I had IPStar for a while....what a nightmare....

[cracktheskye]

Hi, I was just wondering how far from the main road you lived, I would like to do something like this myself but am probably to far away from the nearest main road. Cheers.

[Sayonarax]

Nice. Im on a main road and cant seem to get fibre.

[dutchy124]

Lucky old Thaimite. I also would like to know how far off the main road you are. I live in Wang Nam Khieo 13k off the 304 main road. I have TOT satellite internet, 2780b per month, for what can only be described as hit and miss internet. Cloudy days are a nightmare with the internet in and out all day. Weekends are slow slow slow.

I know you said what speed you are getting, but all Chinese to me I am afraid, I get around 100kps when downloading, is that anywhere near your speed? I also have unlimited downloading are you getting the same? Sorry to ask all these questions, but I would hate to lash out 50k+ or something to find out I was better off before.

[Chamezz]

Lucky old Thaimite. I also would like to know how far off the main road you are. I live in Wang Nam Khieo 13k off the 304 main road. I have TOT satellite internet, 2780b per month, for what can only be described as hit and miss internet. Cloudy days are a nightmare with the internet in and out all day. Weekends are slow slow slow.

I know you said what speed you are getting, but all Chinese to me I am afraid, I get around 100kps when downloading, is that anywhere near your speed? I also have unlimited downloading are you getting the same? Sorry to ask all these questions, but I would hate to lash out 50k+ or something to find out I was better off before.

100KB/s or 100Kb/s? B = Byte, b = bit.

One byte (1B) equals eight bits (8b)

So a 10Mbit downstream would be ~1.25MB/s or ~1280KB/s best case scenario.

40K Baht seems awfully cheap for a fiberoptic install, how long was the distance? Back in Sweden we were quoted around 130K Baht for 100m, just installation of the fibercable.

[thaimite]

General answer to the questions above.

Generally download applications on the PC quote kB/s (kilo Bytes / second) as opposed to kbs (KiloBits per second) quoted by the ISP. 1 Byte does equal 8 bits as above, but the calculation is less simple as each packet of data passing through the ISP has various headers and address details which are needed to route the traffic but do ot actually pass your Network card in to the PC, so in reality a 10bits to a Byte is closer when comparing the 2 types of measurement. (Of course the ISP will do everything to make their number look faster).

My link is 10Kb/s and that was demonstrated using www.speedtest.net by the installer. (Inside Thailand of course). Outside Thailand speeds appear to besimilar but depend on other factors like congestion on the International links.

The installation price of 40K Baht was quoted before the site survey, so must be a fixed price, or may have been given on the basis of my wife's description of the house location.

My cable routing follows the mains electric (no problem for Fibre) and is about 200M long Because the installer was able to follow the existing electric path no extra poles were required, although they did arrive with some long lengths of Bamboo which they may have been intending to use. Only when I suggested that following the mains cable would be an easy option did they survey that method. Prior to that they were looking at bringing the cable in from the other end of the house.

The installation consists of a fairly rigid twin core fibre although strangely only one core is used, which must be a bi-directional half duplex link.

The installation also included supply of a Linksys WRT54G router and a separate modem. Two teams did the installation. The first installed the fibre, and the 2nd set up the router and modem. I have since replaced the modem with a more modern unit supporting Gigabit Ethernet and Wireless N.

Since the system was installed I have done several large FTP transfers including a 12Gbyte international which took most of the day but completed without errors. Thus in general I am very pleased although there seems to be short outages most days.

Edited August 31, 2012 by thaimite

[Chamezz]

General answer to the questions above.

Generally download applications on the PC quote kB/s (kilo Bytes / second) as opposed to kbs (KiloBits per second) quoted by the ISP. 1 Byte does equal 8 bits as above, but the calculation is less simple as each packet of data passing through the ISP has various headers and address details which are needed to route the traffic but do ot actually pass your Network card in to the PC, so in reality a 10bits to a Byte is closer when comparing the 2 types of measurement. (Of course the ISP will do everything to make their number look faster).

My link is 10Kb/s and that was demonstrated using www.speedtest.net by the installer. (Inside Thailand of course). Outside Thailand speeds appear to besimilar but depend on other factors like congestion on the International links.

The installation price of 40K Baht was quoted before the site survey, so must be a fixed price, or may have been given on the basis of my wife's description of the house location.

My cable routing follows the mains electric (no problem for Fibre) and is about 200M long Because the installer was able to follow the existing electric path no extra poles were required, although they did arrive with some long lengths of Bamboo which they may have been intending to use. Only when I suggested that following the mains cable would be an easy option did they survey that method. Prior to that they were looking at bringing the cable in from the other end of the house.

The installation consists of a fairly rigid twin core fibre although strangely only one core is used, which must be a bi-directional half duplex link.

The installation also included supply of a Linksys WRT54G router and a separate modem. Two teams did the installation. The first installed the fibre, and the 2nd set up the router and modem. I have since replaced the modem with a more modern unit supporting Gigabit Ethernet and Wireless N.

Since the system was installed I have done several large FTP transfers including a 12Gbyte international which took most of the day but completed without errors. Thus in general I am very pleased although there seems to be short outages most days.

Sounds very nice. Have you done any gaming or anything else to test your peering abroad?

Generally, peering both in and out of Thailand seems dodgy at best. My friends in Sweden with 100/100Mbit still get around 3-400MS to thailand, which is what I get with my 6Mbit. I've also noticed that they seem to cache your data and then sending it in batches, i.e. if I do a speedtest to Sweden or Germany I'll get peaks of up to 30Mbit/s.

Do you know the prices for 100/10 and 100/100Mbit from CAT? I've looked at their website several times and I've never found any pricing, only what kind of connections they can offer.

[thaimite]

Sorry I did not check prices for other speeds.. All I know is that with TOT my 10/3Mb link is the basic package and faster is available but what I have will do me for now. I do not know if CAT provide this service.

I am not in to gaming and did note any ping times. Unfortunatly I configured my router to not respond to Pings, and the WakeOnLan setup for my server and NAS is a phone call to the wife!

Thus I cannot check at this time.

Edited August 31, 2012 by thaimite

[Chamezz]

Sorry I did not check prices for other speeds.. All I know is that with TOT my 10/3Mb link is the basic package and faster is available but what I have will do me for now. I do not know if CAT provide this service.

I am not in to gaming and did note any ping times. Unfortunatly I configured my router to not respond to Pings, and the WakeOnLan setup for my server and NAS is a phone call to the wife!

Thus I cannot check at this time.

Could you run a latency test on pingtest.net (same company as speedtest.net) to Sweden and US east coast?

[thaimite]

Sorry I did not check prices for other speeds.. All I know is that with TOT my 10/3Mb link is the basic package and faster is available but what I have will do me for now. I do not know if CAT provide this service.

I am not in to gaming and did note any ping times. Unfortunatly I configured my router to not respond to Pings, and the WakeOnLan setup for my server and NAS is a phone call to the wife!

Thus I cannot check at this time.

Could you run a latency test on pingtest.net (same company as speedtest.net) to Sweden and US east coast?

Sorry no.

I am not at home at the moment and am unable to help. All I have is FTP access when the WakeOnLan operator obliges

Edited August 31, 2012 by thaimite