Sinet fiber optic, any reviews?

seesip · September 8, 2013

Took a look at their site and will try to give them a call, but hoping to get some feedback beforehand. They're advertising some pretty fast speeds.

Mestizo · September 8, 2013

Once its installed and up, it's fairly decent. They outsource the install to a 3rd party company. The install techs are great with handling and installing fiber, but not very knowledgable about networking or computers. They were making basic mistakes like attempting to assign the same IP address to the Wifi AP and the fiber router. They didn't understand basic networking concepts like ping and arp caching. Eventually watching them struggle became too painful so I stepped in and took over for them.

Anyway, overall the service is fairly reliable, but I did suffer thru a 3-4 day outage once.

As with any internet connection in Thailand, you are still limited by the bandwith available at the international gateway (plus the additional lag of the ISP/ Govt proxies). The speeds advertised are domestic bandwith only.

That said, bittorrent speeds are really, really nice. My bittorrent client (Transmission on OSX), regularly reported download speeds of 4+M/s.

The only big drawback for me, was an almost 8,000 THB penalty for early cancellation.

-Mestizo

seesip · September 8, 2013

Once its installed and up, it's fairly decent. They outsource the install to a 3rd party company. The install techs are great with handling and installing fiber, but not very knowledgable about networking or computers. They were making basic mistakes like attempting to assign the same IP address to the Wifi AP and the fiber router. They didn't understand basic networking concepts like ping and arp caching. Eventually watching them struggle became too painful so I stepped in and took over for them.

Anyway, overall the service is fairly reliable, but I did suffer thru a 3-4 day outage once.

As with any internet connection in Thailand, you are still limited by the bandwith available at the international gateway (plus the additional lag of the ISP/ Govt proxies). The speeds advertised are domestic bandwith only.

That said, bittorrent speeds are really, really nice. My bittorrent client (Transmission on OSX), regularly reported download speeds of 4+M/s.

The only big drawback for me, was an almost 8,000 THB penalty for early cancellation.

-Mestizo

Good to know. Any idea what the international speeds would be like?

Mestizo · September 8, 2013

As I recall, I did some initial speed tests to US based servers and the download speeds were only registering about 1-2 M/s (on a week day afternoon)

Not sure how much of that was international gateway limitations and how much of that was because of the crap chain of of ISP / Government proxies the HTTP traffic has to go thru.

-Mestizo

Tywais · September 8, 2013

This is a comparative analysis of Internet speeds using a very high speed (1 Gbps) fiber optic link at my office at Chiang Mai University. This will give a good feel of the International gateway limitation.

CM - BKK

CM - Los Angeles

CM - San Francisco (speed here is consistently higher so perhaps the submarine cable comes to shore here)

CM - New York

CM - London

jonwilly · September 8, 2013

I asked about Si net on this board about a month ago and got no replies.

I e mailed Si net and tried calling no luck.

john

CMSteve · September 9, 2013

I've just cancelled my SiNet connection. Inside thialand it was pretty fast. Ookla/flash based tests always reported 30Mbs/3Mbs. Java based and download/upload test told another story. Speeds outside of the country were not good. 1 - 3Mbs to the US. My 3BB connection(13/1Mbs) was doing 4-6Mbs. Luckily, we were able to cancel the services without any penalty as the technicians were not able to get consistent speed test results over two days of checking.

seesip · September 9, 2013

Thanks to all for the helpful info, greatly appreciated.

cjars · September 9, 2013

Been waiting for 3BB to do fttx in Sansai for 8 months, still not possible. Sinetfttx has only been in CM 3 months, using CAT engineers and TOT gateway. Is direct ftt cable to house from box so very reliable. 1200/month no deposit for router. Tested at 31mb up and 3mb down, very happy with the switch over.

johnkypri · September 14, 2013

Everyone says about international gateway being slow but it's not really true, I'm with Sinet fibreoptic 1200baht a month in ChiangMai, I get consistent 30mbps on speedtest.net and around 7mbps on testmy.net (which is a true reading for international) fast enough for both of us to have our TV's linked up and watch whatever online in real time.

What you have to do is complain showing the speedtest.net and ask you be put on a bridged connection. Either to restrict bandwidth or save on wiring costs they put most peoples traffic through a super router from point a too point b in the city and a bridged connection is a direct line which massively improves ping and improves line speed too

rohitsuk · December 22, 2013

I had SiNet installed on Thursday and my house is only 200 metres from the connection station but it is totally hopeless. Sure to Bangkok it is 30mb but once you leave Thailand it drops dead. 1-3mb = too slow to live stream video from my providers in the UK so only You Tube works and only just at that.

On Thursday evening a nice lady with good English called from SiNet and when I told her it was very slow she said, oh yes we have been having trouble for a couple of weeks now with slow speeds, I will pass this on to our service team.

Fortunately I did not cancel my 3BB 13mb package which returns twice the speed of SiNet and only occasionally does it stutter on video streaming when it is having a bad day. I did a parallel test today with my desktop attached to 3BB and my laptop to SiNet and tried to stream from the same three UK websites on both machines. 3BB managed all three, one at a time, and SiNet froze in seconds on two of them and would not even open the third site.

In the UK I pay B125 a month for unlimited broadband of around 10mb and have never had a problem streaming anything from anywhere and the service is close to 100% reliable. Yes, I know, “every like is not the same O Caesar”. But I think that internet is expensive in Thailand and not very good either. Too much power in too few hands and no nice ferocious watchdog with big sharp teeth !

Tomorrow I will send SiNet an email telling them if they cannot do better than this then I want to cancel and I hope I won’t have a fight over the B5,400 charge for cancelling after only five days !

Rama · December 23, 2013

Have had it for 3.5 months now. Just changed to 3BB. When it's up it's good, but unreliable. Too much unreliable. They also have horrible customer service (as in none) and they also have some virus or malware on their server. I pointed it out to them and got no where. Still has the virus/ malware on it.

DaamNaam · December 28, 2013

Have had it for 3.5 months now. Just changed to 3BB. When it's up it's good, but unreliable. Too much unreliable. They also have horrible customer service (as in none) and they also have some virus or malware on their server. I pointed it out to them and got no where. Still has the virus/ malware on it.

None is right. Disgraceful in fact.

Looking for alternatives in the land of "nothing good lasts too long".

MartinBKK · January 22, 2014

I have TOT FTTH and it's been a little inconsistent recently. I used to have TRUE DOCSIS before TOT but that was much slower so i cancelled it. Now i am considering 3BB Fiber so would be grateful for some input on that. Is it worth switching over from TOT? I am in the sansai area.

Thanks

123Chiangmai123 · February 6, 2015

We have used sinet service for a while and the 24 hr service is excellent no contract, speed has been superb we have used it for live hockey games without a hitch, I used to live in Bangkok and true service was lagging too badly, 3bb just kept disconnecting. I can honestly say my sinet is better then my service I had with bell in North America. They have english speaking person to help 24/7( I must say he speaks better English then a lot of us) from when I spoke to him once over a minor question we ended up talking over an hour he is very approachable. If anyone would like to contact him please call 088-870-0706 his name is Pakin. As well one thing I found out about international speed there are several pipelines you can use( eg. We watch hockey so we picked the pipeline that is best for North America) there's also European pipelines as well Call above number they can give you more info and it did not cost me extra to do so. We are getting 10mb or more for North American usage. We registered and paid one day then got hooked up the next morning. It is a treat to not have to deal with automated system when you call their number you actually speak to someone it does not get any better then that

123Chiangmai123 · February 6, 2015

Service has been so good we went to pay for one full year service and get 2 months free promotion since we would have to pay anyways might as well get a discount, I also asked and found out they have 3international pipelines for my 30mb download package to optimize speed depending on customers

Symphony for Primarily North American and Asian countries

UIH for European countries.

And INET for general usage. That really explain why my speed is so fast to watch my NHL hockey live in High definition

tigerbeer · February 24, 2015

hi i thought i would bring up this topic since its quite old now and things might have changed. Thinking of subscribing to SiNet but wanted to see if there is any experience using them. prices seem reasonable enough and i am getting horrible service with TOT>

123Chiangmai123 · February 24, 2015

hi i thought i would bring up this topic since its quite old now and things might have changed. Thinking of subscribing to SiNet but wanted to see if there is any experience using them. prices seem reasonable enough and i am getting horrible service with TOT>

It has been perfect for us with almost no outage, I would recommend you to call Pakin he could assess your need and recommend the best package for you. His phone number is 088-870-0706 he can speak English well

WorkingTourist · February 25, 2015

hi i thought i would bring up this topic since its quite old now and things might have changed. Thinking of subscribing to SiNet but wanted to see if there is any experience using them. prices seem reasonable enough and i am getting horrible service with TOT>

I’ve had it for 3 months now. No problems, and if I run a speed test to Bangkok, I get higher than advertised speeds.

However, international speeds are not so good, this is also revealed when running a speed test to the UK or US. This primarily affects streaming, where “buffering” is all too common.

There was another Sinet thread where this issue came up, though someone claimed that you can call Sinet and tell them you want your international traffic going through a certain pipe. To me this sounds very weird, and there is no technical reason that a customer should tell their ISP how traffic should be routed.

123Chiangmai123 · February 25, 2015

by all means I agree with you that we should not have to tell them which international pipelines to use however the company would not know as well what your primary usage is that's why more info for them would help maximize your speed this is what I just ran with speedtest.net to dreamhost in Los Angeles

hi i thought i would bring up this topic since its quite old now and things might have changed. Thinking of subscribing to SiNet but wanted to see if there is any experience using them. prices seem reasonable enough and i am getting horrible service with TOT>

I’ve had it for 3 months now. No problems, and if I run a speed test to Bangkok, I get higher than advertised speeds.

However, international speeds are not so good, this is also revealed when running a speed test to the UK or US. This primarily affects streaming, where “buffering” is all too common.

There was another Sinet thread where this issue came up, though someone claimed that you can call Sinet and tell them you want your international traffic going through a certain pipe. To me this sounds very weird, and there is no technical reason that a customer should tell their ISP how traffic should be routed.

123Chiangmai123 · February 25, 2015

I can not say it was smooth right from get go but I made a few calls to keep tweaking to get it where it is now. At least the company is willing to help you if they know you have a problem. I would not have known about the pipelines without talking to Pakin and their technicians as well this is what we are watching live right now in HDtrim.F812E4A4-696E-42E5-BAD2-5A0456CBFF54.MOV

Edited February 25, 2015 by 123Chiangmai123

worgeordie · February 25, 2015

The Internet providers are all the same they make promises

they never intend to keep,almost every week one or other

advertises a whopping increase in speed for the same or little

more money,BUT,those speeds are only for inside Thailand,

once to try to connect outside Thailand is where you find the

truth out.

Regards Worgeordie

123Chiangmai123 · February 25, 2015

It is true all companies only advertise domestic speed to servers in bangkok which annoyed me as well however when I went back to Canada test speed to Thailand with Bell was unacceptable as well. These companies do not lay down their own backbone fibre optic under the ocean that's why they have purchase international pipelines from other companies from my understanding. I can only speak from my own experience that my service has been exceptional for live sports and netflix(with a little trick done) I am quite happy with my speed to California since that's the server I usually pick or New York for live events. At roughly 10mb up/down to USin general is even better then previous poster using Chiang Mai University's 1Gbps connection if that is all you can get with 1 Gbps(1000Mbps)connection why not just pay for the one I use with better speed there

The Internet providers are all the same they make promises

they never intend to keep,almost every week one or other

advertises a whopping increase in speed for the same or little

more money,BUT,those speeds are only for inside Thailand,

once to try to connect outside Thailand is where you find the

truth out.

Regards Worgeordie

WorkingTourist · February 25, 2015

by all means I agree with you that we should not have to tell them which international pipelines to use however the company would not know as well what your primary usage is that's why more info for them would help maximize your speed

Internet packets (traffic) carry their destination, and routers should work to pick the fastest route.

A router does not look up that “this packet is from customer X who has a preference for US servers”.

Furthermore, incoming packets (i.e. downloads) are not under the control of Sinet until they hit Sinet’s servers (in Thailand). If Sinet has an international gateway to both Europe and Northern America, they cannot make data from Northern America come in over the European connection (unless they drop packets to make the European route look better).

So my guess is that they throttle international traffic to keep costs down (e.g. payment to their international partner(s) who carry the traffic, and/or investment in equipment at the international gateways).

If you complain about it, they may decrease throttling because you are after all paying for non-throttled speed, but may feed you a story about “moving you to another pipe” to cover over the fact that they sold you 15/5 but only gave you 5/2 out of Thailand.

Just my 2 cents…

123Chiangmai123 · February 25, 2015

I am no techwiz by anymeansbut I noticed that if they just tweaked then the ISP on speedtest.net both ISP/IP address shown on screen should remain the same however mine changed(from Internet Thailand to Vibhavadi Rangsit) to another after they told me they did which is consistent with what they told me unless of course they can come into my system to fool speedtest on that which I do not think they can do . I can only speak for myself that my speed has been superior to my former True at 1800baht a month and 3BB(1200 baht/month) in Bangkok

my own speedtest to Fastmatrics in Sanfrancisco today tests at

Towerstream in Boston, MA

and Dreamhost in Los Angeles

are more then acceptable and better value then what you would get with other ISP I would like someone to try and test from North America to bangkok and see if they would get the advertised speed(I know I did not even get close to acceptable speed it with Bell Canada)

by all means I agree with you that we should not have to tell them which international pipelines to use however the company would not know as well what your primary usage is that's why more info for them would help maximize your speed

Internet packets (traffic) carry their destination, and routers should work to pick the fastest route.

A router does not look up that “this packet is from customer X who has a preference for US servers”.

Furthermore, incoming packets (i.e. downloads) are not under the control of Sinet until they hit Sinet’s servers (in Thailand). If Sinet has an international gateway to both Europe and Northern America, they cannot make data from Northern America come in over the European connection (unless they drop packets to make the European route look better).

So my guess is that they throttle international traffic to keep costs down (e.g. payment to their international partner(s) who carry the traffic, and/or investment in equipment at the international gateways).

If you complain about it, they may decrease throttling because you are after all paying for non-throttled speed, but may feed you a story about “moving you to another pipe” to cover over the fact that they sold you 15/5 but only gave you 5/2 out of Thailand.

Just my 2 cents…

123Chiangmai123 · February 25, 2015

since a few people asked about speed I get so I went around testing around the world these are the best ones I found from Singapore, Japan, England, Belgium, USA, Norway and Sweden by all means some servers were slower which led me to believe that it is that server's limitation but this is intended to show that the capacity to receive great speed is there I am using 30/10 package with Sinet if anyone wish to come test at my place just contact me all of these were tested today as dated and timed

Bangkok-Thailand Cattelecom Server

Dataguard AS server- Oslo, Norway

GLBB Server- Japan

Greenfield Communication server- Fullerton, California

Voo Server-Leige, Belgium

Namesco Server- London, England

viewqwest Server- Singapore

by all means I agree with you that we should not have to tell them which international pipelines to use however the company would not know as well what your primary usage is that's why more info for them would help maximize your speed

Internet packets (traffic) carry their destination, and routers should work to pick the fastest route.

A router does not look up that “this packet is from customer X who has a preference for US servers”.

Furthermore, incoming packets (i.e. downloads) are not under the control of Sinet until they hit Sinet’s servers (in Thailand). If Sinet has an international gateway to both Europe and Northern America, they cannot make data from Northern America come in over the European connection (unless they drop packets to make the European route look better).

So my guess is that they throttle international traffic to keep costs down (e.g. payment to their international partner(s) who carry the traffic, and/or investment in equipment at the international gateways).

If you complain about it, they may decrease throttling because you are after all paying for non-throttled speed, but may feed you a story about “moving you to another pipe” to cover over the fact that they sold you 15/5 but only gave you 5/2 out of Thailand.

Just my 2 cents…

Edited February 25, 2015 by 123Chiangmai123

Awk · February 26, 2015

by all means I agree with you that we should not have to tell them which international pipelines to use however the company would not know as well what your primary usage is that's why more info for them would help maximize your speed

Internet packets (traffic) carry their destination, and routers should work to pick the fastest route.

A router does not look up that “this packet is from customer X who has a preference for US servers”.

Furthermore, incoming packets (i.e. downloads) are not under the control of Sinet until they hit Sinet’s servers (in Thailand). If Sinet has an international gateway to both Europe and Northern America, they cannot make data from Northern America come in over the European connection (unless they drop packets to make the European route look better).

So my guess is that they throttle international traffic to keep costs down (e.g. payment to their international partner(s) who carry the traffic, and/or investment in equipment at the international gateways).

If you complain about it, they may decrease throttling because you are after all paying for non-throttled speed, but may feed you a story about “moving you to another pipe” to cover over the fact that they sold you 15/5 but only gave you 5/2 out of Thailand.

Just my 2 cents…

What you say is true. However, an ISP is welcome to tag packets from a given customer as they ingress/come in, and use that tag to later on choose a different, perhaps more US or Europe-centric route on egress. I.e., instead of the router only taking into account the destination, the router can also take into account the tag (which in practice means to take into account that the packet is from a customer in group X).

I am not a Sinet customer and have no idea if that is what they are doing, or if they are doing what you suggest. If I were to make a bet, I'd normally bet on them doing what you suggest, especially if bandwidth was the only thing that improved, but I note that the "ping" (http connection setup I think) results posted by the Sinet cutomers here are vastly better than I get with 3BB when trying a few random times today and yesterday. I have not gotten below 300ms to LA with 3BB when doing this, yet I see Sinet-results quoted here down to 230ms. I would not think removing throttling would have a mentionable effect on a ping-style test, unless you are maxing out your throttled bandwidth.

If the latency is indeed that much better with Sinet, and the same holds true for Europe, perhaps I will switch to Sinet. Don't care much about bandwidth, but care about skype'ing between my children and my parents.

I am not sure if anyone here has asked Sinet to be switched to the "European pipe", but if they have, it would be interesting if they could post the speedtest result for some servers in Europe during a few random times of day.

123Chiangmai123 · February 26, 2015

the only thing I do not like is the variance from one server to the next in the same city but in cases like that I do not think we can call them and say it is Sinet's doing(in my opinion anyways) I have a friend who has their European pipeline I can certainly try to see if he can share some results but I wouldn't think it would be much better than this one(maybe to certain servers) any suggestions on which countries you want me to test?? right now I am going to try to every country and see what the max speed to that country is when I have some sparetime

by all means I agree with you that we should not have to tell them which international pipelines to use however the company would not know as well what your primary usage is that's why more info for them would help maximize your speed

Internet packets (traffic) carry their destination, and routers should work to pick the fastest route.

A router does not look up that “this packet is from customer X who has a preference for US servers”.

Furthermore, incoming packets (i.e. downloads) are not under the control of Sinet until they hit Sinet’s servers (in Thailand). If Sinet has an international gateway to both Europe and Northern America, they cannot make data from Northern America come in over the European connection (unless they drop packets to make the European route look better).

So my guess is that they throttle international traffic to keep costs down (e.g. payment to their international partner(s) who carry the traffic, and/or investment in equipment at the international gateways).

If you complain about it, they may decrease throttling because you are after all paying for non-throttled speed, but may feed you a story about “moving you to another pipe” to cover over the fact that they sold you 15/5 but only gave you 5/2 out of Thailand.

Just my 2 cents…

What you say is true. However, an ISP is welcome to tag packets from a given customer as they ingress/come in, and use that tag to later on choose a different, perhaps more US or Europe-centric route on egress. I.e., instead of the router only taking into account the destination, the router can also take into account the tag (which in practice means to take into account that the packet is from a customer in group X).

I am not a Sinet customer and have no idea if that is what they are doing, or if they are doing what you suggest. If I were to make a bet, I'd normally bet on them doing what you suggest, especially if bandwidth was the only thing that improved, but I note that the "ping" (http connection setup I think) results posted by the Sinet cutomers here are vastly better than I get with 3BB when trying a few random times today and yesterday. I have not gotten below 300ms to LA with 3BB when doing this, yet I see Sinet-results quoted here down to 230ms. I would not think removing throttling would have a mentionable effect on a ping-style test, unless you are maxing out your throttled bandwidth.

If the latency is indeed that much better with Sinet, and the same holds true for Europe, perhaps I will switch to Sinet. Don't care much about bandwidth, but care about skype'ing between my children and my parents.

I am not sure if anyone here has asked Sinet to be switched to the "European pipe", but if they have, it would be interesting if they could post the speedtest result for some servers in Europe during a few random times of day.

Awk · February 26, 2015

the only thing I do not like is the variance from one server to the next in the same city but in cases like that I do not think we can call them and say it is Sinet's doing(in my opinion anyways) I have a friend who has their European pipeline I can certainly try to see if he can share some results but I wouldn't think it would be much better than this one(maybe to certain servers) any suggestions on which countries you want me to test?? right now I am going to try to every country and see what the max speed to that country is when I have some sparetime

Right. No, no particular servers. I will repeat with whatever servers he tries myself to compare my 3BB connection and see if that results in anything usable. Thank you.