Best 3G Network?

I’m on Taiwan Da Ge Da, and so far I’m not super impressed with their 3G coverage. Unlimited plan is 800 a month. Is each carrier setting up their own separate 3G network of towers, or do they share? If separate, can people report their experiences with the different carriers?

Alternatively, I hear you can get WiFly for your smartphone for 100 a month. Wonder if this will log in and hand off seamlessly. And, is WiFly exist outside Taipei City, e.g. into the county?

I’ve never had any problems with CHT’s 3G service in the Taipei area. I pull down around 1GB a month with push email, surfing on my phone, and tethering to my notebook. I also haven’t had any problems using SSH or OpenVPN which indicates CHT isn’t doing any port filtering or traffic shaping on the network which is important if you’re thinking of doing more than just email and web browsing.

I just ran a test at www.speedtest.net connected to the server in Taichung and got:
Ping: 147
Down: 0.99Mb/s
Up: 0.33

I pay just over NT$1000 a month for my iPhone, voice, data, and hosted Exchange (mPro) service, data only plans should start a little cheaper.

WiFly is Taipei only, you can see their access point locations here.

I’ve never tried WiFly personally, but my friend uses the NT$500/month service for Internet at home, and torrents the shit out of it. It may be that the NT$1200 a year “pocket plan” comes with stricter usage restrictions, but at least you’re not tied to a multi-year contract if you try it out.

The main consideration of using Wi-Fi vs 3G on your phone is that Wi-Fi will eat your battery, you won’t be able to leave Wi-Fi connected all day on a single battery charge.

[quote=“Rik”]I’ve never had any problems with CHT’s 3G service in the Taipei area. I pull down around 1GB a month with push email, surfing on my phone, and tethering to my notebook. I also haven’t had any problems using SSH or OpenVPN which indicates CHT isn’t doing any port filtering or traffic shaping on the network which is important if you’re thinking of doing more than just email and web browsing.

I just ran a test at speedtest.net connected to the server in Taichung and got:
Ping: 147
Down: 0.99Mb/s
Up: 0.33
[/quote]

Probably pull in excess of 20-30GB/month here. Also, while the speed for individual connections is not so good, speed from multiple connections is excellent. This is a screenshot of my 3G network usage when downloading a 700+MB file from usenet (10 concurrent connections to a server in the US)

jashsu are you on CHT too? 10 connections to USA… I thought Giganews gave 20 connections now, and they have a HK server too… :wink: Anyway how much is your plan?

Yes, CHT with the 850 plan (unlimited internet, no mPro). I used Giganews Diamond for a while a few years ago, but I stopped and just grabbed tv shows from my friends instead. I’m on Easynews now.

Toe Tag,

What kind of speeds are you pulling with Taiwan Dageda? I agree that it ought to be a little faster, but realistically with carriers in Taiwan oversubscribing customers, I am not surprised that none of us would ever be able to reach anywhere near theoretical maximum.

Here’s how fast I’m getting with Taiwan Dageda in Taipei County:

That’s through tethering my iPhone 3G to my Mac running Snow Leopard via USB. Based on my test experience, internet browsing on Macs has typically been a little slower than what one would get on PC (but no more than maybe 5% difference, only really observable when downloading files off browsers). It’s better than what I used to get on Vibo, and on par with what I was accustomed to back in the States (Southern California and New York City).

catfish, haven’t had a chance to measure it yet. My complaint was more that there seems to be spotty coverage in some parts of Taipei County.

If Taiwan Dageda is spotty for you, then I guess the only other choice is CHT. With Vibo I would get no receptions within some buildings throughout Taipei, which is simply unacceptable IMO. I guess it’s an unreasonable demand to have 100% coverage everywhere, but Taipei isn’t a very big place and it’s not like everything is spaced miles apart that they can’t afford to build up a solid network.

[quote=“jashsu”]
Yes, CHT with the 850 plan (unlimited internet, no mPro). I used Giganews Diamond for a while a few years ago, but I stopped and just grabbed tv shows from my friends instead. I’m on Easynews now.[/quote]

What’s mPro?

Thanks

It’s a product targeted toward business customers that gives users access to CHT’s hosted Exchange Activesync server. The client devices also are preloaded with a custom mPro Exchange client.