Why Does Thai Hotel Wi-Fi Run In Pulses?

[Trevor25222]

This month I have been staying at modest hotels, mansions and guest houses in Bangkok and Pattaya in the Baht 600 - 1100 price range. They all offer wi-fi Internet at speeds ranging from 2 - 9 Mbps but the service is incredibly patchy and cyclic. This typically means that nothing connects for several minutes, then it comes back for a while at a good speed, only to slow to nothing again 5 or 10 minutes later. It's a daily occurence, incredibly frustrating and I sense it is the ISP at fault rather than heavy user activity at the hotel.

Can anyone explain why this occurs and whether there are any remedies? Thank you.

[Theboy]

Would suggest it’s more likely to be many users

[Pib]

I expect the hotels are being fed with one internet line (i.e, not a lot of bandwidth to start with) and as users jump off and on the connection the speed varies greatly. Just a case of not enough bandwidth.

Kinda like using a water hose....with just one hose the water shoots out under good pressure (good bandwidth), but as you connect more hoses to that one main hose the amount of water out of each hose drops off (less bandwidth)....if some of those hoses are turned off then the pressure to the remaining hoses increases (more bandwidth).

[Trevor25222]

Would suggest it’s more likely to be many users

The worst place was a Pattaya guest house with only 5 rooms! Still feels to me as if the ISP is slowing bandwidth because I can't even get slow loading of pages during bad periods.

[Paul888]

If it's an unsecured network which many are, then everybody who can see the signal will probably be using it.... not just the hotel's paying guests.

[tingtongtourist]

I also have this problem all the time no matter which place i stay.Not much you can do.As well as my hotel being bad connections I even went to get the wireless true vision dongle set up, pay 1000 baht for it and then 500 a month and is SO slow.now i use this when hotel internet is bad,which usually every second day

[Chicog]

Probably people downloading torrents.

[RandomSand]

Professionals that deploy wireless networks use specialised software where the composition and dimensions of the building are used as input parameters. The software can then perform its calculations and produce config files for the APs and where they should be fixed.

So don't expect such well planned infrastructure in cheap hotels!

This slow / fast problem can be caused by bad channel assignment in WLAN access points... In some cases units are set to "auto channel" and flip about all the time because there are so many competing units in the same frequency.

If you want something doing right, you gotta do it yourself, eh ?

[RandomSand]

One thing that you can try is this:

1. See if there are some advanced settings in your wireless adaptor configuration. Look for "manually bind to BaseStation MAC address" or similar. This is availble on my Intel adaptor.

2. If You DO have control over this, then use some some software like inSSIDer to get a list of the local access points, find the available AP with the strongest signal.

3. Taking the BSSID MAC address discovered using inSSIDer, input it into your wireless adaptor advanced config.

It might work or it might not but worth a try.

Another thing to try is getting a 5M M-F USB cable and a WiFi dongle. Then position Dongle to get strongest signal.

[Chicog]

None of that will make any difference if one or more users is swamping the thing with bittorrent.

[RandomSand]

None of that will make any difference if one or more users is swamping the thing with bittorrent.

yes, this is true.

[Trevor25222]

If it's an unsecured network which many are, then everybody who can see the signal will probably be using it.... not just the hotel's paying guests.

That was not the case. It's near impossible nowadays to find open networks in Thai tourist centres.

I don't accept that there are hordes of tourists downloading torrents and slowing down the networks. It's more-logical to do this at home where things run faster; they have other distractions when in Thailand. Most punters only need email or web info searches.

[RandomSand]

You're up against a number of potential problems. 1. Hotels buying the cheapest internet package. 2 Badly configured Access Points. 3. Cheap modem routers that cannot handle many simultaneous connections. 4. Users then trying to download the whole internet on these systems.

Of course there's nothing you can do except use 3g which should be fine for email and web info searches.

[Trevor25222]

Of course there's nothing you can do except use 3g which should be fine for email and web info searches.

I used True Move 3G in Pattaya in November 2010 when it was just being rolled-out. Lightning speeds because of few users then but it really ate up my Baht at a rate of knots! Are the rates any cheaper now, or any options better than True Move for 3G? Thanks.

[Khun Jean]

Tourists do like to upload pictures, movies, and have long webcam,voip sessions with the family. Combine that with slow connections, cheap routers that often not have enough cpu and memory capacity, often restarts because firmware crashes and you have the typical use case of 'free wifi' in hotles and guesthouses.

As the upload speeds are most only a fraction of the download speeds this uploading and webcamming or voip sessions can use up all upload bandwidth very quick. Many times it needs only one user to gobble up all upload bandwith.

Your latency then goes from a few hundred milliseconds to seconds.

Constant streaming data is also one of the reasons cheap routers crash or are out of resources. The 5-10 min cycle looks like the router is having that problem.

[wpcoe]

I used True Move 3G in Pattaya in November 2010 when it was just being rolled-out. Lightning speeds because of few users then but it really ate up my Baht at a rate of knots! Are the rates any cheaper now, or any options better than True Move for 3G?

I can't recall which plans were offered two years ago, but I suspect the prices are a bit lower now. Assuming you are talking about volume-based prepaid TrueMove-H plans, this is what is currently on offer:

If I finally understand these plans correctly, the ones shown above are recurring (i.e. autmatically renewing) 30-day plans. The 70MB, 150MB, 1GB plans stop when you reach the data limit. The 2GB, 3GB, 5GB and 7GB plans will continue afer you reach the data limit, but at a lower speed until the next 30-day package kicks in. I believe the lower speed is 128Kbps, based on the asterisked comment at the bottom of the three plan charts on the web page linked above.