Fiber Optic Internet In Bangkok

[artiztik]

I'm attempting to get fiber installed at my new condo. I've been told no already by True and 3BB. I still need to visit the TOT and CAT offices. I'm just hoping for something more reliable and faster than DSL.

1. Are there any other ISPs offering cable or fiber?

2. Anyone here have TOT or CAT fiber in Bangkok? How are the international speeds lately? What plan are you on?

Thanks

[SoFarAndNear]

Forget fiber in your condo. Even the newest Condo buildings wont have fiber lines to the rooms.

International Internet Bandwidth with fiber is the same like DSL, 3G or whatever at the same provider. Anyone who is buying more then 10mbit because he want faster international speed wasting money. You only get these +10mbit speeds in Thailand or maybe to HongKong or Singapore. But not US or Europe. The only thing what you can do with +10mbit Line in Thailand is faster Torrents Downloading.

If you really want more reliably speed on international you have to apply for a business tarif. Then you will have guaranted international bandwidth.

Edited May 14, 2013 by SoFarAndNear

[artiztik]

I've heard about people getting cable lines installed to their rooms 20 floors up.

But you're saying I can get 10Mb international with DSL ?

[SoFarAndNear]

Ok, I heard only that it is kind of impossible to get fiber in the condo, only in offices and with high setup costs.

But anyway you will no get a much better performance to websites hosted in US or Europe. Your browsing will defiantly not getting faster than before, even if you have 100Mbit in the home. And on high internet using times after 6PM to 12 you will face the same low speed and un-reliability than with DSL.

Every Internet Provider in (Thailand ToT, CAT, True, and so on) has much lesser international bandwidth the national bandwidth. And the are sharing the whole bandwidth to all their customers. You only have more speed to your Provider but they still have the same bandwidth to the outside internet. It is little bit like a Toll-Way on the highway, you maybe get to the Toll-Both on your Easy-Pass lane faster, but after the Both you sharing the same lanes with all other cars.

The only way you will get always good international connection is to apply to a business tarif. Because your bandwidth will then be guaranted and you will even get priority on international bandwidth,

[Guest]

Friend just posted this picture from Singapore. Oh my..lah.

I understood that at least Google have their own bitpipe to Thailand. They likely cache some of their data inside of Thailand. These services (well, youtube at least) would benefit of the fast national internet connection.

[joncl]

Friend just posted this picture from Singapore. Oh my..lah.

OMG another photoshop / doctored report .. "0" ping times - come one

[SoFarAndNear]

Ping und 1MS is not unsually in the same country,

I post some pictures from speedtest made from a dedicated server at CAT Datacenter in Bangkok. The server is connected 100mbit.

Here you can see (nearly) full 100MBit speed in Thailand

And here a speedtest outside Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, US, Netherlands

You can see you will never get more then 10mbit up and download international traffic. And the hosting of the server costs around 3000Baht per month.

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

The comment above about not being able to GET fiber to the home in Bangkok is not correct....I believe.

TOT has been installing a fiber to the home system in BKK, and there has been past discussion of if here on the forum.

Last time I checked with TOT directly, they told me it would be about a year before it was available for setup. That was about a year ago, so it's about time I check back with them again.

That said, I do tend to agree with the poster above that, at best, it is unclear that having a fiber system installed here at home will do much/anything to improve INTERNATIONAL bandwidth to the U.S. or Europe, because of the limited/shared/throttled connection Thailand employs for those destinations.

On the other hand, a fiber to the home setup MIGHT well provide increased bandwidth for serial/multi-threaded downloading as well as for accessing content that is cached either in Thailand or regionally in places such as Singapore, where Thailand has faster/closer connections to.

Ultimately, it all comes down to the provider, in this case, TOT, which doesn't exactly have a great track record of technical innovation and execution. How they manage and provision the fiber system will be key. And thus far, I don't believe we've had anywhere enough user reports to get any idea whether it will be a boon or a bust.

TOT fiber 2U, internet broadband service over optical fiber cable provided by TOT. IT supported unlimitedly both business and private segments with speed from 10 Mb to 30 Mb, convering 20 kilometers of service areas from its telephone exchange.

http://www.tot.co.th/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=349:tot-fiber-2u&Itemid=711〈=en

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/492266-tot-fiber/?hl=%2Btot+%2Bfiber#entry6354735

Looks like CAT is also doing something similar. See the details below:

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/622053-cat-on-net-any-current-experiences/?hl=%2Bfiber2u#entry6155676

One user in the above CAT thread reported paying a 10,000 baht install fee to CAT, and then getting only 2-3K Mbps upload and download speeds to/from the U.S.

Edited May 15, 2013 by TallGuyJohninBKK

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

It looks from this TOT pdf document (unfortunately only in Thai) that they're offering 10, 20 and 30 Mbps plans via their Fiber 2U service. But, as noted, if you read here about TV members dealing with TOT, you'll find a lot of very unhappy campers.

http://www.tot.co.th/files/Fiber2U_thai.pdf

TOT also appears to have some business-oriented fiber plans with rated higher speeds, and presumably higher prices as well.

http://www.tot.co.th/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=610:smartbusiness&Itemid=252〈=en

Here's an English language translation of the above Thai website that I did as an Adobe PDF document.

TOT Fiber 2 U Promo 2013.pdf

Edited May 15, 2013 by TallGuyJohninBKK

[Pib]

Friend just posted this picture from Singapore. Oh my..lah.

OMG another photoshop / doctored report .. "0" ping times - come one

Heck, there is even a millisecond or so ping time just between your computer and your router due to electronics response delay. Maybe not doctored; just an inaccurate Speedtest.net result. Or maybe they have faster-than-light servers in Singapore.

Speedtest.net, and other Flash-based testers, are notoriously inaccurate (can be easily fooled by local cache servers) for speed testing to international sites. It's usually OK to check your local basic connection speeds, but that's about it....but then again above speedtest.net test within the Singapore area with its 0m ping time indicate it's being fooled big time at least on ping time. Now Speedtest.net does appear to not be fooled on some networks...a lot depends on how your ISP has their network setup.....how is caching used...how is proxy servers used....etc.....but for the most part beware of Flash-based testers like Speedtest.net as they can be easily fooled and can be notoriously inaccurate.

[Guest]

Friend just posted this picture from Singapore. Oh my..lah.

OMG another photoshop / doctored report .. "0" ping times - come one

You can easily follow the image to the source and see that it's not photoshopped.

I don't know how the speedtest.net crops the ping time results. Does it have to be 0.49ms or .099ms to be 'rounded' to 0ms.

[Guest]

Heck, there is even a millisecond or so ping time just between your computer and your router due to electronics response delay. Maybe not doctored; just an inaccurate Speedtest.net result. Or maybe they have faster-than-light servers in Singapore.

I'm clocking 0.6ms ping times from the server to my oldish billion mode, which is far from being state of the art device.

Light does travel 300km in millisecond. On the fibre, probably 100km/ms. I don't know, but would guess that each switch on the isp and speedtest.net provider network would not add huge amount of latency to the packets. It would be nice to know if someone have more details.

[Guest]

Just asked the friend to try the ping directly. Here are the results.

[root@fgw ~]# ping 202.83.100.1
PING 202.83.100.1 (202.83.100.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 202.83.100.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=63 time=2.49 ms
64 bytes from 202.83.100.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=63 time=2.52 ms
64 bytes from 202.83.100.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=63 time=2.48 ms
64 bytes from 202.83.100.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=63 time=2.54 ms

--- 202.83.100.1 ping statistics ---
9 packets transmitted, 9 received, 0% packet loss, time 8000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.460/2.506/2.546/0.062 ms

So not less than 1ms. But at this time the speedtest.net also showed 4ms latency.

[cutter007]

The easiest thing and cheapest thing to do if you want high speed (international also) is not to try and fool around with a fiber circuit,

these are useful if your going to host some site or service, with local traffic accessing it.

Most people are right here in assuming, you will get a fast speed in Thailand but the ISP will still throttle your bandwidth on international circuits, and at a ridiculous speed considering the money you will be paying for it.

The way to beat them at this is buy too cheap, DSL packages with two different companies, lets say 3BB and True. (not recommending either

as all ISPs here are lying jerkwads)

Should cost you about 600 - 800 baht for each, so totaling about 1,500 baht, then you hook them both up to a router with multi wan ports,

the Cisco RV016 is cheap, but I think the Cisco RV042 is more reliable. Just make sure you buy one where the router has the multiplexing over the two WAN links, I think someone was telling me once about one that won’t combine TCP links across the two ports, which I found hard to believe but anything is possible when it’s IT coming out of China.

I am pretty sure, that for international links, this setup will get you a speed around 150 - 175% faster than if you were to buy one of the more expensive

packages costing around 3,500 baht a month. I think the RV042 is about 5,000 baht, so the setup pays for itself in less than 3 months.

Don't get two packages from the same company, I tried this once and they throttled the bandwidth on both like it was only one connection (completely unethical) I even encrypted the traffic at two different layers, which fooled them for about 72 hours, and then they were back at it again. If the ISPs here are competent at doing anything it's promising a speed and then making sure you don't get it.

[jaycor]

I used to get 0ms ping times in Singapore. Had Singtel fibre installed in my office. Super quick.

Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

[lomatopo]

I wouldn't get too hung up on the actual physical medium which gets terminated in your condo. Someone might terminate fiber in the basement, or out on the street, and then pull copper up to your actual living space. Very few customers are getting fiber terminated inside their home.

We tried CAT OnNet in a few SoHo applications and it was a nightmare, and as been uninstalled, and should be avoided unless you like a sharp stick in the eye, repeatedly, day after day, ad infinitum.

TOT does have some FTTx solutions, and 3BB are installing FTTx in a lot of new housing developments in metro-Bangkok.

The dual-WAN suggestion may help in some specific applications, and is great to back-up access in the event of an outage ( many outages here tend to affect both, independent access methods), but choose the router carefully - making sure it supports your application requirements.

There are a bunch of FTTx-specific Thai-centric web-sites and blogs. Even legacy sites like adslthailand have a lot of user experiences with FTTx.

SoFarAndNear's post #2 is succinct and accurate.

[shariq607]

I wouldn't get too hung up on the actual physical medium which gets terminated in your condo. Someone might terminate fiber in the basement, or out on the street, and then pull copper up to your actual living space. Very few customers are getting fiber terminated inside their home.

We tried CAT OnNet in a few SoHo applications and it was a nightmare, and as been uninstalled, and should be avoided unless you like a sharp stick in the eye, repeatedly, day after day, ad infinitum.

TOT does have some FTTx solutions, and 3BB are installing FTTx in a lot of new housing developments in metro-Bangkok.

The dual-WAN suggestion may help in some specific applications, and is great to back-up access in the event of an outage ( many outages here tend to affect both, independent access methods), but choose the router carefully - making sure it supports your application requirements.

There are a bunch of FTTx-specific Thai-centric web-sites and blogs. Even legacy sites like adslthailand have a lot of user experiences with FTTx.

SoFarAndNear's post #2 is succinct and accurate.

Do note that cat's supplied huawei based router has some inbuilt international bandwidth throttling software or some form of mechanism. In thailand you get full plan speed but internationaly you get crappy speeds. However after changing to your own routers there is no more throttling. I am speaking from experience of two cat fiber users.

[sniffdog]

Anyone who is buying more then 10mbit because he want faster international speed wasting money. You only get these +10mbit speeds in Thailand or maybe to HongKong or Singapore. But not US or Europe. The only thing what you can do with +10mbit Line in Thailand is faster Torrents Downloading.

What a load of crap. I have a True 16Mbs DSL connection and get always 1.8 - 1.9MBs downloads with Usenet (NZB) from either Europe or the US. Also downloads with Internet Download Manager are often that fast even from servers in the US.

With torrents it's not guaranteed that you will get these speeds, because the speed is dependent on many factors including the # of seeds etc. Very rarely you would get speeds above 9-10Mbs, because True throttles torrents. But using a SIN vpn you get 1.6 - 1.7Mbs on well seeded torrents.

So it's total non sense you'll be wasting money for packages above 10Mbs. It doesn't make sense at all to say you will get more 10Mbs on torrents (where most seeders are outside Thailand) but not on direct server downloads from Europe or the US. It's the number of connections that count.

Edited February 16, 2014 by sniffdog

[Pib]

Anyone who is buying more then 10mbit because he want faster international speed wasting money. You only get these +10mbit speeds in Thailand or maybe to HongKong or Singapore. But not US or Europe. The only thing what you can do with +10mbit Line in Thailand is faster Torrents Downloading.

What a load of crap. I have a True 16Mbs DSL connection and get always 1.8 - 1.9MBs downloads with Usenet (NZB) from either Europe or the US. Also downloads with Internet Download Manager are often that fast even from servers in the US.

With torrents it's not guaranteed that you will get these speeds, because the speed is dependent on many factors including the # of seeds etc. Very rarely you would get speeds above 9-10Mbs, because True throttles torrents. But using a SIN vpn you get 1.6 - 1.7Mbs on well seeded torrents.

So it's total non sense you'll be wasting money for packages above 10Mbs. It doesn't make sense at all to say you will get more 10Mbs on torrents (where most seeders are outside Thailand) but not on direct server downloads from Europe or the US. It's the number of connections that count.

Yeap, all depends on whether the program you are using and website/server you are connecting to can multi-thread or it's only single-threaded. Torrents/download managers multi-thread, but generally browsing, video streaming, emailing, etc., are single-threaded operations. I probably spend 95% of my time in the single-threaded world because I'm pretty much just a general computer user who mostly browses and emails....I'm not into torrents. But I know many folks do a lot or torrents.

[sniffdog]

Correct. If you are in a single threaded world you don't even need a 10mbs connection. A 5mbs connection would do even if you watch YouTube or other videos. But if you are into downloading, your options are very good in Thailand.

Sent from my C6802 using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

[shariq607]

Correct. If you are in a single threaded world you don't even need a 10mbs connection. A 5mbs connection would do even if you watch YouTube or other videos. But if you are into downloading, your options are very good in Thailand.

Sent from my C6802 using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

Good? I believe one of the best if not best for downloading because Thailand is one of the few countries i know that does not limit or apply monthly bandwidth cap even on the cheapest dsl plans. Even in states they do have some limit on bandwidth cap. True did talk about the bandwidth cap on an hour scheme but honestly i know so many folks who frequently exceeds it and have never encountered any throttling due to exceeding the allowance.

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

FWIW, I've been getting very good results to the U.S. lately with HMA VPN, much better than any of the prior several VPNs I've used over time.

With a 15 Mbps-rated True cable service in BKK, with HMA, I'm getting 2 - 3 Mbps sustained averages to the U.S. during daytimes, and sustained 1-2 Mbps averages even in the peak evening times here. That's about double what I had been getting previously. And those a REAL results, verified by the real-time NetWorx app readings on my PCs.

With the HMA service, it's totally eliminated any periodic streaming buffering issues I'd been encountering previously -- since I too mostly live in the single stream world.

HMA has a server based in BKK, but that's not the one I'm connecting to... And I don't know if their local server here is helping me reach the U.S. in an expedited way. All I know is, it's working better than any previously that I've used.

Edited February 16, 2014 by TallGuyJohninBKK

[shariq607]

This is to those all who say Thailand has crappy internet infrastructure,

here is my 10,000 baht per month premium line which i am happy to pay because i get decent international single threaded bandwidth,

Test to san jose west us (single threaded)

:::.. Download Speed Test Result Details ..:::

Download Connection Speed:: 20568 Kbps or 20.6 Mbps

Download Speed Test Size:: 19 MB or 19456 kB or 19922944 bytes

Download Binary File Transfer Speed:: 2571 kB/s or 2.6 MB/s

Tested At:: http://TestMy.net Version 13

Validation:: http://testmy.net/db/9GHuUZT

TiP Measurement Summary:: Min 8.53 Mbps | Middle Avg 23.7 Mbps | Max 25.85 Mbps | 18% Variance

TiP Data Points:: 8.53 Mbps, 19.37 Mbps, 22.34 Mbps, 24.3 Mbps, 25.18 Mbps, 23.53 Mbps, 24.55 Mbps, 23.41 Mbps, 23.79 Mbps, 23.49 Mbps, 23.91 Mbps, 25.85 Mbps, 23.15 Mbps, 22.14 Mbps, 23.41 Mbps, 25.75 Mbps, 25.71 Mbps, 23.01 Mbps, 12.92 Mbps

Test Time:: 2014-02-17 01:19:19 Local Time

Location:: Bangkok, TH TH >> Destination:: San Jose, CA US

1MB Download in 0.4 Seconds - 1GB Download in ~7 Minutes - 367X faster than 56K

This test of exactly 19456 kB took 7.761 seconds to complete

Running at 416% of hosts average (CAT Telecom public company Ltd http://testmy.net/hoststats/cat_telecom_public_c)

User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.107 Safari/537.36 [!]

[Pib]

When seeing results like above it just reconfirms to me that Thai ISPs throttle international connections unless maybe you have a pricy Internet business plan.

Sent from my Onda V971 tablet

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

Shariq, I'm assuming that's the CAT fiber connection you've posted on in the past. What's the rated speed for the plan you're buying?

The speed result you posted above is actually the first legitimate, good speed fiber result I can recall anyone posting here... as opposed to people posting Speedtest.net results with sub 50ms ping times and claiming the results were speeds from the U.S.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but I was intrigued by this detail in your testmy.net results:

Running at 416% of hosts average (CAT Telecom public company Ltd)

I believe that means your test result above is, for some reason, four times faster than the average of all prior testmy.net results done using CAT as the ISP.

I'm assuming that's partly related to you paying CAT 10,000 baht a month for their plan. But was it also you who posted something the other day talking about avoiding some kind of built-in speed throttling in their company-provided modem/routers???

All in all, I'm sure you have your reasons for shelling out 10,000b a month for internet service. But for most people, paying $300+ a month for internet service is crazy money!

PS - The download size you tested at 19 MB is relatively small. I'd be curious to see if the same speed results hold when you test at larger/longer downloads like 50 MB or higher...

[lomatopo]

The CAT On Net Platinum/Platinum Plus plans are really targeted at businesses, provide static IP addresses and range in price from 6,900 baht/month (15/3) up to 25,000 baht/month (100/10). I haven't reviewed the SLAs on these plans, but suspect the bandwidth is guaranteed within Thailand.

The Silver, Gold and Gold Plus are targeted at home users. My experience is with these and it was ultimately unacceptable in two installations. Platinum plans were proposed and considered but ultimately discarded based on the reference customer experiences.

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

Loma, when I've talked to True and 3BB about their fiber services in the past, if memory serves, both were talking about mandatory 1 year service (and I presume billing) commitments. Nothing in the way of "try it, and see if it works for you."

How's CAT On Net in that regard? And when you or your associates bailed out of their CAT On Net services, presumably after less than a full year of service, how did that go with CAT in terms of penalties or financial stuff?

I wouldn't mind giving CAT or 3BB fiber a try at some point, if nothing else just to have a basis for comparison with my current True cable. And I'd be willing to pay some reasonable installation charge. But I'm sure as heck not going to commit to paying 12 months of fees at X,000 baht per month with no idea going it whether the service is going to be worthwhile or not.

[shariq607]

Loma, when I've talked to True and 3BB about their fiber services in the past, if memory serves, both were talking about mandatory 1 year service (and I presume billing) commitments. Nothing in the way of "try it, and see if it works for you."

How's CAT On Net in that regard? And when you or your associates bailed out of their CAT On Net services, presumably after less than a full year of service, how did that go with CAT in terms of penalties or financial stuff?

I wouldn't mind giving CAT or 3BB fiber a try at some point, if nothing else just to have a basis for comparison with my current True cable. And I'd be willing to pay some reasonable installation charge. But I'm sure as heck not going to commit to paying 12 months of fees at X,000 baht per month with no idea going it whether the service is going to be worthwhile or not.

I know a few guys who do have the basic cat onnet silver and gold packages but they get nothing like me in terms of international speed, even their routing for some odd reason was different and slower than mine. As for 3bb fttx I can't really speak about business packages which costs 7000 a month but a friend of mine who has the cheapest 1200 baht fiber plan gets the same international bandwidth as his previous 3bb ADSL.

I am really not sure what package I am using at the moment but when I initially signed up two years ago I think it was 25 mbps platinium or something but every few month or close to a year my ISP upgrades the speed plan for the same price.

[LorLenLad]

Very interesting and timely thread. I've been using the True ADSL package for 3 years now in our house in Bangkok. However, I am now getting in to trading and need a fast reliable internet connection to the US. I will be using this mainly from 2pm to midnight (ish), Thai time. For me, bandwidth is not the key factor - but latency and reliability are... (of course decent bandwidth for other non-trading related activities is always a plus).

I was getting terrible ping, packet loss and speed results on True for so long (pingtest.net results to SIngapore were coming in at D* / E / F classification, with the best ping times always in excess of 200ms, and jitter varying from 20 to 200+. The results to a US server were considerably worse (if possible). The True technician came out several times but his tests to a Thai based server I guess reported no issues.

I have decided to get a fiber line run to the house - TRUE and 3BB's options are not available where I am, but TOT have a "hub" at the entrance to the housing development so they can install Fiber 2U. I'd appreciate some advice here as I am not so clued up on all this, my limited knowledge for varied net searches:

1. TOT have a package for 1,290 per month for 20 Mbs on Fiber 2U which seems fine for me. Do you think the Fiber 2U package will produce less latency than my True ADSL was getting?

2. TOT comes with a FORTH GPO-4900WS router - is this going to be sufficient, or should I buy my own router, and which would you recommend? TOT will charge me just over THB 3k I think - to be honest, if the router made a difference I would be willing to stretch that to about THB 5k.

3. Some posters here refer to the max international bandwidth that I will get is 10 Mbs due to throttling - is there any way around this if I change the router, or is the only "fix" to sign up for a business type plan (which is beyond my budgets / needs).

Any input / wise words of advice would be much appreciated :-)

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

If you read thru the various threads, I think you'll find very little in the way of good comment, at least thus far, from customers who have signed up for the various Thai ISP fiber plans. In general, they're considerably more expensive than the typical DSL or cable alternatives, but don't seem to provide a corresponding improvement that matches the price.

And TOT service in general seems to get bad responses from users. That said, I suppose it's possible that TOT's fiber MIGHT do better for you than True's DSL service. DSL can be pretty good or pretty bad depending, among other factors, on how far away you are located from their switch.

A lot of the performance issues here tend to be location specific for any particular ISP, depending on where you are and how their equipment is in your area. Unfortunately, the ISP's fiber plans don't make it easy to sign up and try, since they seem to be intent on extracting year-long service commitments.