The end of Buddy Broadband?

[Litlos]

I have been using Buddy for about 3 years, pretty good uptime and reasonable rates. I am away at work at the moment and today I get an email from the TGF saying BuddyBB is closing up from the end of the month and not to pay any more money to them. Having a quick look at the news there is nothing saying that Buddy is closing up shop, or is it just my condo? I tried having a look at the Buddy website and it appears that they are still taking money, so I have no idea what is actually going on.

Anyway assuming that Buddy will no longer be available for one reason or the other it looks like I have a choice of TOT or True, the condo is in lower Sukhumvit area of Bangkok. I tried looking at TOT and they do not have any package data in English, so one strike against TOT. True has a small amount of info from which I can work out that there is basic internet for about 699 baht and something about free TV, but the English page view is mostly Thai.

So any feedback on which is better between TOT and True, and any information on the free IPTV for either will be much appreciated.

Luckily I will be back in Thailand late next week and have a few days to sort it out first hand before the end of the month.

Cheers

[dddave]

The "Free" True TV are the Thai educational channels. Not very much programming in English; some travel and nature stuff but nothing mainstream.

Sorry, can't help on the BUDDY question.

[Litlos]

Well back home and they are still saying Buddy closing up at the end of the month, interesting as they sent a reminder to pay by SMS.

Found out the condo has swapped to the true package for TV anyway, so no need to subscribe to the same programming. Have changed to True Docsis and hopefully installed tomorrow just as Buddy subscription runs out. I reality I foresee using 2/3g via phones over the weekend and possibly early next week. The condo manager is trying to hurry up and I suspect he gets a kickback from whoever so it may just happen, think positive, LOL.

Cheers

[Sojuncoke]

I was with Buddy Broadband up until August then I changed to True and never looked back. My experience with Buddy Broadband was HORRIBLE.

First of all, their accounting department is horrid. They dont know the simple task of pro-rating an account. For two weeks I had to go on a trip so I did not pay for the pre-pay for those 2 weeks. When I came back and started paying the 1200 bath mid month, they only gave me 2 weeks of service. I called them up and asked "why can't you just adjust my pre-pay date?" and "why didn't you just pro-rate it?" they had no idea on how to do that. When I told them to ask the manager to give me a call back, he or she never did. So they made me pay another 1200 baht after 2 weeks. I should have cancelled my account then and there but I did not have time to wait a week for a new service provider to install since I work from home.

Secondly, I was on a supposed "12 MB connection" for 1200 baht with BuddyBB for one year. When I switched to True and asked for a 12 MB connection, the installer told me the building was only capable of 7MB. So the whole year that I was with BuddyBB, they were ripping me off 600 baht a month.

I am so glad they are going out of business that's for sure.

[Straight8]

Well back home and they are still saying Buddy closing up at the end of the month, interesting as they sent a reminder to pay by SMS.

Found out the condo has swapped to the true package for TV anyway, so no need to subscribe to the same programming. Have changed to True Docsis and hopefully installed tomorrow just as Buddy subscription runs out. I reality I foresee using 2/3g via phones over the weekend and possibly early next week. The condo manager is trying to hurry up and I suspect he gets a kickback from whoever so it may just happen, think positive, LOL.

Cheers

I am basically in the same boat and have been informed they will be operational up to the end of this month [November], so now i need to find another provider which is unfortunate as for the 5 years i have been with them there was a period a little while ago i had some issues with the download speeds, but in the past 6 months they haven't missed a beat. Hardly any downtimes, and full 1000 KBs + [on the 10MB plan] speeds any time of the day. Now I have to go through the process of maybe having to go with True, which I hope they have changed there stupid policy of only 1GB of downloads per hour at maximum speed.

Currently i am awaiting a reply from 3BB to see if they service my area and my condo, so unless True have no throtting and temporary shaping, I may go with 3BB if they are an option.

Sojuncoke, how is True now, any drama with downloads???

[Litlos]

Yes I eventually got the same sort of letter from Buddy offering a free month as they were not going to service my area anymore, but had already switched over to True.

I had not really noticed the bit about the downloads and just checked it out. Yes they do seem to have some sort of throttle after a while, though not exactly sure when it kicked in. Using my VPN I can run fast downloads all the time as True cannot identify what the traffic is. Was just getting 1.5MiB/S across two downloads. I have seen it as high as 1.8MiB/S.

So for about $3 per month for a VPN I get my web traffic not being analysed by the Thai government (especially my banking details), I can access the lottery and Ebay sites when at work and not get hit by the company policy's and download faster when at home. Good result on this one.

Cheers

[Straight8]

Yes I eventually got the same sort of letter from Buddy offering a free month as they were not going to service my area anymore, but had already switched over to True.

I had not really noticed the bit about the downloads and just checked it out. Yes they do seem to have some sort of throttle after a while, though not exactly sure when it kicked in. Using my VPN I can run fast downloads all the time as True cannot identify what the traffic is. Was just getting 1.5MiB/S across two downloads. I have seen it as high as 1.8MiB/S.

So for about $3 per month for a VPN I get my web traffic not being analysed by the Thai government (especially my banking details), I can access the lottery and Ebay sites when at work and not get hit by the company policy's and download faster when at home. Good result on this one.

Cheers

It's not so much the speed that bothers me, [i'm referring more to peak times] if it drops to even half, but the 1 or 1.2GB per hour then throttle is something ridiculous. At 10MB speeds you could reach that in under 20 min.

How are you going with your downloads? Are you getting decent amount of data? Notice any significant drop in Download speeds??

I'm currently looking at the promo 15MB plan for 699.

[Litlos]

I was just checking while on VPN and about 1.2MiB/S. Cut off the VPN and it is running 1.3MiB/S but will monitor and see if it drops off again after a bit of download. The best I have done from memory is about a 4gb movie in 25 minutes.

Don't worry to much about a super high speed plan as that speed is only within Thailand and about 1.5MB is all you can expect on websites not in Thailand. I went with the True Docsis cable plan so that I do not have a landline phone and another bill for that.

Cheers

[HardenedSoul]

Yes I eventually got the same sort of letter from Buddy offering a free month as they were not going to service my area anymore, but had already switched over to True.

I had not really noticed the bit about the downloads and just checked it out. Yes they do seem to have some sort of throttle after a while, though not exactly sure when it kicked in. Using my VPN I can run fast downloads all the time as True cannot identify what the traffic is. Was just getting 1.5MiB/S across two downloads. I have seen it as high as 1.8MiB/S.

So for about $3 per month for a VPN I get my web traffic not being analysed by the Thai government (especially my banking details), I can access the lottery and Ebay sites when at work and not get hit by the company policy's and download faster when at home. Good result on this one.

Cheers

Yep without VPN, True just shapes the hell out of any torrent downloads especially at peak hours.

Lucky to get 150kb/s downloading a 5.5Gb movie

Connected VPN and voila, topped out at 5.3MB/s

[Straight8]

Litlos, who is you VPN service with?

Any others you guys could recommend?

[Litlos]

I simply googled "best VPN" and followed a couple of the links, the best link I found was to VPNS.Net. There is something about the protocol the VPN uses whether it can be detected by the ISP or not. Based on this I tried PIA for a month and then took out a years subscription.

Cheers

[Straight8]

is PIA the acronym for "privateinternetaccess.com" ??

cheers

[Litlos]

is PIA the acronym for "privateinternetaccess.com" ??

cheers

That is the one

Cheers

[sniffdog]

As Newsdemon is my usenet provider I have a VPN from slickvpn.com which is their partner. The fee is 3 bucks a month and it's very good. Not so many ips as hidemyass, but sufficient and better speeds than HMA.

About torrents, yes True throttles bittorrents. But problem, easily solved with a Singapore VPN which allows for good speeds (even on public torrents sites).

[Straight8]

Looking at getting onto the True 15MB promotional plan DOCSIS. I take it DOCSIS is cable as opposed to DSL??

If so, how are you finding it Litlos????

Reliable, better than buddy etc?

cheers

[Litlos]

Looking at getting onto the True 15MB promotional plan DOCSIS. I take it DOCSIS is cable as opposed to DSL??

If so, how are you finding it Litlos????

Reliable, better than buddy etc?

cheers

Yes DOCSIS is cable, comes in on the same sort of coax as the TV, and seems to be reasonably fast and comes with a free TV decoder for basic channels, but has HD. So the TGF gets to see her Thai soap in HD, oh the waste of bandwidth, LOL. The advantages of cable over ADSL are no need for landline phone and possible extra charge for supply. Also with ADSL the further you are from the exchange the slower it gets, also poor line quality means slower.

It is hard to get a real speed test as True will cache the data and skew the results. I just did one to Singapore using Linkwan.com which gave realistic results of 1.4Mb/s. It is now peak time at 5PM, so this is about as good as it gets for speed external to Thailand. I have had up to 1.8Mb/s earlier in the morning on torrent downloads. To put this in perspective is about 25 minutes to download a 4.5gb torrent.

Initially the connection was a bit flaky. But they were upgrading/repairing the cable a couple of weeks ago citing water damage. So far since then has been zero problems and nice and fast. I previously had the Buddy 10mb plan and they seemed to have a Dslam in the complex as connection speeds were very good and no ADSL lag. The True 15mb connection is definitely faster and now pretty stable. So in a country where you tend to pick the least worst rather than the best I am pretty happy.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

[Straight8]

Thanks for the reply Litlos, very much appreciated.

Will be going ahead with the 15MB plan, good amount faster than I have now, even though Buddy was working quite well for me now. Will opt for cable, as you did mention it is a fare bit cleaner and more reliable not having to get the data down a phone line, however I still need my line for calls OS, so unfortunately can't make use of dropping that, but really no big deal.

I will hopefully get it in the next week or so and provide some feedback.

Cheers once again

[Litlos]

Thanks for the reply Litlos, very much appreciated.

Will be going ahead with the 15MB plan, good amount faster than I have now, even though Buddy was working quite well for me now. Will opt for cable, as you did mention it is a fare bit cleaner and more reliable not having to get the data down a phone line, however I still need my line for calls OS, so unfortunately can't make use of dropping that, but really no big deal.

I will hopefully get it in the next week or so and provide some feedback.

Cheers once again

Hope it works out with True.

I use a CAT Phonenet card for calling OS which is a free call from a mobile, so hence no need for a landline. The CAT system is very good quality to Aust which is where I am usually calling, and pretty good on the rates as well. I have set up an account with Thaitelephone.com and can recharge this online. You can buy these cards from either 7/11 or Family mart if you wish to try out. I have been using CAT phonenet for about 8 years now and have been pretty good except for peak times like xmas etc.

Cheers

[Straight8]

Just another question, I know True provide you with a modem for the DOCSIS connection setup, so...

1. It is Wifi right?

Reason I ask is that on an older thread there was mention that cable was limited to only one computer [cabled], which in modern technology i found quite ridiculous. May have been true at the time [the thread was at least 3 years old] but I gather this type of modem/router is WIFI capable??

2. If we want to use another modem/router does it have to be a specific design to be compatible with DOCSIS, or does your normal off the shelf modem/router work just fine?

Cheers..

Thanks for the CAT phone card info.. again, unfortunately i am up high and mobile reception in my place is not even mediocre at best.

Edited November 11, 2013 by Straight8

[Litlos]

True supplied a cable modem and a Wi-Fi router which are interconnected by an Ethernet cable. I was not to fussed on the supplied router so I switched routers and used my old modem/router set to router only mode, this gives me 3 wired Ethernet ports plus Wi-Fi, (one wired port used to connect to modem). Works ok and I did not need to go and reset all my devices to suit the True router settings.

Cheers

[Straight8]

cool, thanks.. i'll see how it goes!

cheers