Hi,
I have rent a house in New Taipei City without internet. I’ve been here for just 1 year (with an ARC). Unfortunately, I can’t speak/read Chinese and it’s hard for me to apply for one. As far as I’ve searched here are my options:
4G static from CHT or T-Star
ADSL
Fiber optics
My use cases will be Netflix, Youtube and video chats. I probably have around 100GB per month or more. So I prefer unlimited or high traffic case. Beside that I don’t know how to apply online. Most of the sites are in Chinese. Any suggestion?
I went into one of their physical stores and went through the internet registration process. I brought my ARC and Passport. I was quite new to Taiwan at the time and my Chinese wasn’t fluent and they spoke English to me.
I was paying something like 850 TWD a month for unlimited data and a 60mbit download speed and 20mbit upload speed.
They then set up a day where the technician would come set up the modem/router and then that was basically it. Everything went well and I had no issues with them over the course of 5 years of using their service.
I want to share some technical stuff that I encountered dealing with Changhua Telecome’s HiNet.
First off you can’t use your own ADSL modem. Their DSL endpoints do not fully follow the standard. My modem had the connection dropped and had to sync every couple of hours for a few minutes, no internet during that resync. The Taiwanese company that makes the modems ensures that they are without competition.
I asked them to give me a better version, as their crap doesn’t even have Gigabit Ethernet. They did not have anything better.
I ended up using their modem to talk to DSL endpoint and establish PPPoE connection through my modem. This way I have full control of my home network and can ignore their hardware.
You won’t be using your own hardware, CHT provides them and they don’t charge a rental fee for them so there’s no point.
Also CHT fiber is more than enough for netflix. Don’t use mobile network for this because their bandwidth can be somewhat limited and if you’re a real power user they could possibly throttle your connection (I never seen it happen though).
You usually have to apply in person at any CHT store…
Fiber is not available everywhere. Unfortunately not in my area.
There are people who want to use own hardware. I have my specific needs that their hardware is not capable of. Just waste of energy, stuck running another device.
What you use will depend to a large extent on the age/type of building you are in and the area you are in. I struggled for several years here with horrible ADSL from HiNet, supposed to be either 50 or 100mbs download, wasn’t anything like it even when it was working, their modem/router is a POS as well. Our building finally signed up to digital TV so fibre was connected and I could cancel CHT and go with the local TV/Fibre provider, now have 500/50 for less than CHT cost with 1Gb being installed early next year, again, cheaper than 100m with CHT.
CHT technical support sucks, their technicians only work M-F office hours unless it’s something serious when they might make an exception so a real PITA to problem solve. The local cable company is 7 days a week until 9pm. Also the cable company agree to only a one year contract as a special for “foreigners” as we mightn’t live here that long!
I’d also recommend Taiwan Broadband as well. They also have high speeds using Cable/DOCSIS. I enjoyed using their service. The stores and service centres were able to provide support.
4G will NOT let you open ports here. On wired connections, you can have your modem tuned to bridge mode and use your own Router for wifi, of which you then have control over port forwarding.
Additionally with CHT they claim to not throttle bandwidth for Torrenting, which I don’t believe. With a dynamic IP once a certain download amount was reached (can’t remember but I think it was around 10gig) the speed would drop off a cliff, would have to reset and hope to get a “good” IP and then speeds would be back up until the 10g was hit again. I’ve had no issues with cable, BT flies and so does netflix. The cable modem/router is actually reasonably high end DLink hardwear in a different box so easy to navigate the menus and bridge it, set up firewall rules etc. Haven’t needed to connect up my own Archer which I bought due to CHTs mess.
Our router was crapping out and we had a technician coming in. Luckily this time a younger guy came who knew his stuff and had decent English. So we could discuss a few things, and…
it turns out that piece of useless CHT office dweller lied to us, when he said our street doesn’t have fiber. It is just 20m away from our house the whole time.
Going to upgrade to fiber ASAP and can get a gigabit Ethernet router from CHT, that does not bottleneck my network.
Boils my blood.
Well it took CHT only 6 months to get up their asses. They are installing fiber to the home as I write.
I guess I need to burn some ghost money
Edit:
They actually opened up the street and put a dedicated endpoint at our house. So now only two houses in our street have fiber. Instead of getting it done for everyone, they do it a house at a time
useless CHT office dweller lied to us, when he said our street doesn’t have fiber. It is just 20m away from our house the whole time.
