TOT stopping phone line ADSL in Pattaya?

[Guderian]

I got an almost incomprehensible SMS message from TOT that didn't actually seem to announce anything, it just appeared to be singing the praises of cable/fibre internet over phone line ADSL.

 

Last time I was at their office they wanted me to upgrade to fibre but as I don't watch TV via the internet I didn't see the point in paying 200 Baht/month extra for something I didn't really need. So I'm wondering if they're now forcing people to upgrade by stopping the phone line ADSL service?

 

It may have been something else entirely, but I'd be annoyed to wake up one morning and find that I had no internet. Does anybody have any better information?

[doctormann]

For what it's worth, here is my take on the situation.

 

I've had a fair amount of pressure from ToT, over the last several months, to 'upgrade' my ADSL contract to fibre.  I've resisted the change, so far, as I don't really see much of an advantage in so doing, to be honest, and there are some issues that ToT don't seem willing to address.  For one, the piece of Chinese cr*p router that they want to sell me will clearly be inadequate for my nicely configured LAN.  It would need to be put into bridge mode so that I can use my own router and I can't get them to understand this, so this is a deal-breaker for me.

 

Interestingly, as the number of customers on ADSL has reduced, the stability of my connection has improved.  Disconnections are now rare.  Having said that, the signal/noise ratio on my line has continually deteriorated to the point where my allocated upload speed has needed to be reduced.  I am now only getting 640 kbps rather than the 1Mbps that I am contracted for.  ToT are not interested in improving the quality of the line - it's fine for the land-line phone and that is all that they seem to be bothered about.

 

I suspect that,  rather than overtly terminating ADSL, what is more likely is that the ADSL infrastructure will be allowed to deteriorate to the extent that it becomes unusable, thereby forcing a change to fibre 'by the back door'.

 

I'm considering other options - AIS looks to be favourite at the moment but I would need their 'pro' package, I think, to avoid problems with CGNAT.  Right now, I carry on regardless - things are generally OK, apart from the snail-like upload speed - really makes uploading anything to DropBox, or similar, a very slow process.

 

 

[johng]

Yes they do seem to be pushing the fibre option  ( but not forcing change)   my next door neighbour  who was sharing my WIFI recently got TOT fibre installed  he is not very satisfied as he says my  ADSL/WIFI was  faster and more reliable   he watches youtube on his smart TV

maybe the supplied router is dodgy  I told him to contact TOT so we wait and see.

 

One of the reason I don't want to change is because they force you to use their supplied equipment..they can set it to bridge mode

the engineer not the customer...

@doctormann  have you asked them about  "bitmode" thats the Tinglish for bridge-mode  ( not joking )

[Guderian]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, the standard phone line ADSL service is good enough for me too. I've noticed that uploads take a long time lately, but had no idea why. So we just wait until a flood or lightning or whatever knocks out a piece of their hardware that they won't want to replace and it's by-bye to ADSL over the phone line. I think I'll have a look if somebody is offering a package that includes cable TV, that way I can save 300 Baht.month on Sophon.

[johng]

2 minutes ago, Guderian said:

I think I'll have a look if somebody is offering a package that includes cable TV, that way I can save 300 Baht.month on Sophon.

 

Sophon offer internet too  most accounts say its quite good.

[doctormann]

33 minutes ago, johng said:

Yes they do seem to be pushing the fibre option  ( but not forcing change)   my next door neighbour  who was sharing my WIFI recently got TOT fibre installed  he is not very satisfied as he says my  ADSL/WIFI was  faster and more reliable   he watches youtube on his smart TV

maybe the supplied router is dodgy  I told him to contact TOT so we wait and see.

 

One of the reason I don't want to change is because they force you to use their supplied equipment..they can set it to bridge mode

the engineer not the customer...

@doctormann  have you asked them about  "bitmode" thats the Tinglish for bridge-mode  ( not joking )

 

Bridge mode - bit mode - same same.  I know that this has to be enabled by ToT - you can't do it yourself.

 

The itinerant sales staff that accosted me on more than one occasion seemed to know nothing about this.  They were more concerned with telling me about the fantastic speeds that I would get if I changed to fibre.  I asked if the international speeds would be any better than I get now but couldn't get a straight answer.  My local speeds are more than adequate already.

 

The annoying thing is that you really don't need their cr*ppy router at all if only they would let you use a GPON fibre to ethernet converter.  No chance of that I'm afraid.

 

Maybe I need to go down to Pattaya Klang and speak to a real engineer.  No rush though as the ADSL is still working well, apart from the slow upload speed.

 

 

 

 

[Guderian]

2 hours ago, johng said:

 

Sophon offer internet too  most accounts say its quite good.

 

Yes, I had it many years ago when I lived in a condo in Jomtien. When I moved to a house in a village in South Pattaya they said they could provide the same service but it turned out that my house is at the far end of a soi at the back of the village and it was just too far for them to get a good connection via the cable, which is how I ended up with TOT and ADSL over the phone line.

 

Anyway, the cable TV and cable internet are different companies and I doubt you'd get a discount for using them both. I saw True doing an offer once of fibre internet at 15 Mbps plus cable TV for 599 Baht/month. That would suit me fine, I'll drop by their office one of these days and see what's on offer now. .

[AsiaCheese]

Fibre-2-home isn't an option everywhere though. If you live in a condo building (some say >4 floors), TOT won't play. Instead, they offer VDSL, which is copper-bound (as ADSL) but offers much higher speeds due to a newer way to modulate the signal. My experience with it is quite good (high floor in large condo building in Jomtien), but the modem they give you (Made in Turkey) sucks big time, so I bought a new Linksys modem/router which offers dual band (important for Apple iDevices) and guest SSID. From what I gather, the "backbone" to the distributor-2-phone-cables box downstairs is fibre, which might (?) Be less abyss prone in heavy weather than copper-all-the-way. I pay roughly the same as before, but with 30/10 Mbps speed, which is 3x what I got before with ADSL on a good day.

[Eff1n2ret]

About 3 years ago ToT upgraded our Moo-Baan in Banchang to fibre and then ran a big promotion to get residents to upgrade from 10Mbps to 30. I didn't upgrade, and for a while the service was ok, but then I started getting frequent drop-outs and buffering. We went to the ToT office to complain and were told that everyone else was upgrading to 30 Mbps, and the only way we could get a steady signal was to do the same. I went straight to 3BB and signed up for their 10Mbps (fibre) service at the same price as ToT (631Baht/month) and have had very few problems since - when I have, their English language service at their call centre is excellent, and the service is restored quickly. I have an internet tv service which requires 2 Mbps minimum, again I rarely have a problem.

[jacko45k]

TOT did a good job on me some years ago by providing absolutely useless ADSL service and support!

I cancelled their ISP and had True Cable run in.

 

They may upgrade their network but it will be the same 'we don't care' underlying support.

[StraightTalk]

On 21/01/2017 at 9:19 AM, johng said:

One of the reason I don't want to change is because they force you to use their supplied equipment...

An ISP is a provider of Internet Services, providing ancillary equipment such as routers, aircards etc. is optional.

I'd look for another Internet Service Provider if they'd force me to use their equipment. You should challenge them - they won't like losing a steady paying customer.

My ISP (3BB) will provide pertinent documents to configure any make of router.

[Guderian]

I got a phone call from TOT yesterday afternoon. Apparently they’re going to put the existing fibre system in our village underground. The lady’s English wasn't great so I didn’t catch everything, but they have some sort of special offer on for a limited period where they’ll convert me from the phone line to fibre free of charge and give me 20 Mbps instead of the current 5 Mbps plus my telephone land line for the same price I’m paying at the moment.

 

It sounds like a good offer, I think even the new fibre router comes free. I think I’ll have to go over to their office in central Pattaya to find out exactly what’s on offer.

 

Did anybody else get a phone call along these lines?

 

[digbeth]

I had True ADSL via TOT's (But operated by True) phone lines in my house in Bangkok, a couple of months ago they upgraded the local equipment in my soi and were offering to convert people to fibre for the same price as before but with faster speeds (but looks like the price will be fixed for one year only) I declined then..... 

 

Yesterday they cut off the internet completely, redirecting everything to a page with number to call, and the number was a sign up for new service.... after furious exchange with the call centre, I surmised that True's licence to run the phone lines was running out and it is reverting back to TOT, they managed reconnect ADSL temporarily and will try to book me an 'engineer' to install fibre instead... I've had letter in the post offering 'upgrades' to fibre for a while but in was not clear that they were going to cut of existing adsl

[Guderian]

14 hours ago, digbeth said:

I had True ADSL via TOT's (But operated by True) phone lines in my house in Bangkok, a couple of months ago they upgraded the local equipment in my soi and were offering to convert people to fibre for the same price as before but with faster speeds (but looks like the price will be fixed for one year only) I declined then..... 

 

Yesterday they cut off the internet completely, redirecting everything to a page with number to call, and the number was a sign up for new service.... after furious exchange with the call centre, I surmised that True's licence to run the phone lines was running out and it is reverting back to TOT, they managed reconnect ADSL temporarily and will try to book me an 'engineer' to install fibre instead... I've had letter in the post offering 'upgrades' to fibre for a while but in was not clear that they were going to cut of existing adsl

 

It sounds like they're still working on figuring out what exactly 'customer service' is.

 

I hadn't thought about them only fixing the price for one year. They want something a bit over 700 Baht/month for a 20 Mbps service, but that includes my land line which costs 100 Baht/month to rent, so say a bit over 600 Baht/month for the fibre ADSL. I went to True yesterday and they charge 799 Baht/month for 30 Mbps, 50% faster than TOT, and that price includes 97 free cable TV channels and some sort of data package for your phone. That doesn't leave TOT much scope for raising prices I would say, people will just go to True (or 3bb, or whoever) instead.

[AbeSurd]

I went into the TOT office the other day about my ADSL service (which is on an ordinary phone line to a condo in central Pattaya).

I understood them to say that as I have a condo and not a house, cable isn't possible.

[Guderian]

If anybody's interested, I went to the TOT office yesterday afternoon and asked about the change. It sounds like they're doing away with phone-line ADSL in the village here and trying to get everybody to sign up to the new fibre service. Now this is what confuses me:

 

They installed a fibre system in the village around four years ago, I remember the drive they had to get people to sign up to it at the time. I asked them which lines were the TOT fibre cables and they were running alongside all the phone lines, you could tell them by little orange pulleys where they meet a phone pole.

 

The lady at TOT yesterday explained to me that they'd have to drill a big hole in the wall of my house to get the fibre through. As the existing TOT fibre system is around the same size as the cable TV cable I said they could use the holes already there for that. Oh no they couldn't, I was told, the new fibre system is much bigger, She showed me what it is like and it looks as if it's around an inch in diameter, more like a cable you'd lay on the seabed to supply a small country rather than something for a single house. Presumably that's why it's going to be laid underground rather than strung from the phone poles with all the other cables. Does anybody know why it's so large? Are they getting ready for Gbps++ internet speeds???

[johng]

They diamond cored a 45 mm hole and fitted a 40mm pvc tube
in the outside wall the apartment block I live


,on our floor only 1 person out of the 16 has fibre, the hole in his apartment wall is just big enough for the cable to fit through but with big "blow out" from the drill

[Guderian]

26 minutes ago, johng said:

They diamond cored a 45 mm hole and fitted a 40mm pvc tube
in the outside wall the apartment block I live


,on our floor only 1 person out of the 16 has fibre, the hole in his apartment wall is just big enough for the cable to fit through but with big "blow out" from the drill

 

The 45 mm hole sounds about right from what the TOT lady showed me, but why do they need to drill such a huge hole if they're only putting a standard 5 mm size cable through it? At least that's what it looks like in your photos, did I misunderstand them?

[doctormann]

Just now, Guderian said:

 

The 45 mm hole sounds about right from what the TOT lady showed me, but why do they need to drill such a huge hole if they're only putting a standard 5 mm size cable through it? At least that's what it looks like in your photos, did I misunderstand them?

 

Could be to avoid sharp bends in the cable.  You need to maintain a certain bend radius with fibre optic cables - not the same as with copper.  Does seem to be an excessively large hole though.

 

[Guderian]

2 minutes ago, doctormann said:

 

Could be to avoid sharp bends in the cable.  You need to maintain a certain bend radius with fibre optic cables - not the same as with copper.  Does seem to be an excessively large hole though.

 

 

I certainly hope they're going to seal it with silicone or something afterwards and not leave it open like in the photo, or I'll soon be sharing my PC with all the wildlife in the garden.

[CatCage]

The hole in the picture is way too large, I have CAT fiber into the house and it uses the tiny hole that previously had the ADSL cable in it.  The actual yellow inside fiber optic cable is tiny maybe just 1/32 of an inch diameter yet it can carry millions of bits of data.

 

We also have it running inside yellow plastic conduit for over 150 mtrs to avoid rats eating the cable, it has many normal plastic conduit right angle bends in it  

Edited February 3, 2017 by CatCage

[johng]

In my neighbors installation they have bent the cable in quite sharp angles maybe thats why he is complaining about poor speed ?

[doctormann]

4 minutes ago, CatCage said:

The hole in the picture is way too large, I have CAT fiber into the house and it uses the tiny hole that previously had the ADSL cable in it.  The actual yellow inside fiber optic cable is tiny maybe just 1/32 of an inch diameter yet it can carry millions of bits of data.

 

We also have it running in yellow plastic conduit over 150 mtrs to avoid rats eating the cable, it has many normal plastic conduit right angle bends in it  

 

You get micro-bending losses in a fibre optic cable, every time that you have a bend in the cable run, so you do need to avoid bends, where possible.  The industry standard seems to be that the minimum bend radius should not be less than 20X the cable diameter.  If your cable is indeed 1/32" diameter then you can probably get away with right angle bends in the normal yellow conduit, provided that the conduit is not too small.  Using a conduit to protect the cable is a very good idea.

 

Take a look at this site http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/install/installcbl.html  if you want to know more.

 

 

 

[Guderian]

The TOT guys came yesterday to install the new fibre optic internet. Weirdly they didn't do it as the lady in the TOT office had said they would. She'd told me several times, on the phone and face-to-face, that they would be putting the internet underground. I might have completely misunderstood her and expected them to arrive with spades at the ready, but all they did was to string the new fibre optic cable underneath the existing phone cable.

 

 

There was also no 1'' diameter hole drilled in the wall to avoid sharp bends in the cable (see earlier posts in this thread). They just ran the new cable straight down from the phone line as it reached the house, threaded it through the sun shades, and nailed it to the cement fibre eaves before drilling a small (6 mm I'd guess) hole through the wall to put the cable into the house.

 

 

 

They don't seem at all shy of sharp bends in the cable to be honest. Anyway, it all works and a speedtest showed that the promised 30/15 Mbps speeds are being delivered, at least as far away as Bangkok.

 

 

They provided two boxes, one is a router/WiFi box which is a more up-market version of what I had for the phone line ADSL. I have no idea what the second box is or does (the white ZTE affair), can anyone enlighten me?

 

 

Remember that all of this, the installation which involved installing a new cable all the way down the soi where I live as nobody else here has TOT fibre yet, as well as getting it across my garden and into the house, then setting everything up plus providing the new hardware, was free. Their normal charge is supposedly 7000 Baht so it seems like a no-brainer to go for this when it's offered.

 

Edited February 7, 2017 by Guderian

[Encid]

The white ZTE box is a chinese GPON ONT (Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks Optical Network Terminal).

It's basically the fiber cable router.

This particular unit has a poor wifi broadcast range, so it looks like they've bridged it to a router with 3 aerials in order to provide a better wifi broadcast range.

There is probably an ethernet cable connecting the 2 devices.

Edited February 7, 2017 by Encid

[digbeth]

The white ZTE box is an ONU, which is where the fiber optic cable plugs in. the ONU can function as a router and wifi access point on its own, it is used by both True and AIS as well, the wifi signal and routing ability of this ONU box is pretty universally derided, if you use a lot of device in the house, it would heat up and crash often.... and you wouldn't see 50MBps download on wifi even though the line to your house supports it; which is why many people would demand a 'bridge mode' where the ONU box just acts dumb and pass on the routing function and wifi to a better box.

 

Mind you, in my Ais fibre install, I was given two box with the ONU and a better three mast router as well, but they didn't set it up as a bridge mode, only using the second router as a wifi access point only.... 

[Guderian]

16 hours ago, digbeth said:

The white ZTE box is an ONU, which is where the fiber optic cable plugs in. the ONU can function as a router and wifi access point on its own, it is used by both True and AIS as well, the wifi signal and routing ability of this ONU box is pretty universally derided, if you use a lot of device in the house, it would heat up and crash often.... and you wouldn't see 50MBps download on wifi even though the line to your house supports it; which is why many people would demand a 'bridge mode' where the ONU box just acts dumb and pass on the routing function and wifi to a better box.

 

Mind you, in my Ais fibre install, I was given two box with the ONU and a better three mast router as well, but they didn't set it up as a bridge mode, only using the second router as a wifi access point only.... 

 

Many thanks for the explanation. When I asked the technician he said that the ZTE box was the 'modem' and the black three-mast box is the WiFi. That sounds about right from what you say.

 

I don't have a lot of devices in my house, at most it's the PC and a couple of smart phones, I don't watch internet TV, preferring to download stuff and watch it off a USB stick. So it sounds like I probably wouldn't notice if they set up bridge mode or not. Is there a simple way that I can find out if the bridge mode has been set up? Thanks.

[digbeth]

try logging in to the ZTE box at 192.168.1.1, if it's set up as a bridge mode it would show up somewhere in the settings,

 

but if it already works to your satisfaction, no point in setting up bridge mode

[ThaiBob]

TOT has been upgrading customers in our condominium (Jomtien) from ADSL to VDSL over the last three days at no charge. They give customers new modems/routers. I was paying 640 baht for 10mbps/512kbps and the new service is 20/5 for the same price. I chose 30/10 service for 800 baht. 

[Guderian]

21 hours ago, digbeth said:

try logging in to the ZTE box at 192.168.1.1, if it's set up as a bridge mode it would show up somewhere in the settings,

 

but if it already works to your satisfaction, no point in setting up bridge mode

 

I tried that and all I get is a standard message:

 

The connection has timed out

The server at 192.168.1.1 is taking too long to respond.

 

One weird thing I don't understand is that the new internet seems to be having great difficulty completing downloads from file sharing services like Openload and Clicknupload. It gets to the end of the download, say 700 MB out of 700 MB downloaded, then just stops and thinks about it and eventually tells me that the download failed. This doesn't always happen but I'd guess around 75% of the time it does. Bit Torrents and Mega work fine.

 

Any ideas why the downloads seem unable to complete? I never had this problem with the old service.