ok, so maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but sometimes my dsl really pisses me off. been on giga for a while(my landlord set it up and it’s too much trouble to try to get him to break the contract and go with another isp) and it’s always been pretty slow trying to hit sites outside taiwan. i never do anything that extensive with it, so it’s usually not a big deal for me. the last couple of days though, there have been long periods where giga’s pipe to the outside world just dies off. i can hit taiwan sites fine, but i run a traceroute and just get stuck on their backbone whenever i try to reach some place outside taiwan(except for australia which i can always seem to get to). also a crapload of pingloss everytime i go outside of taiwan.
last night i was trying to download like 3 megs of pics(the new mrt maps that rascal got in case you haven’t seen them yet) and was getting an excruciating 2K/sec. that’s with a download manager which had 15 connections to the server downloading at the same time! the kicker is that i uploaded those pics to another server in the us and was getting 75K/sec upload speed. wtf?!
is anyone else on giga? are you having the same problems? i don’t think it’s just me because i can always seem to hit giga’s backbone fine. god i miss my dsl in the states with sub-100 pings to game servers and consistent download bandwidth.
anyone know if it would help if i used some sort of proxy server to find another path to the us? anything like that available in taiwan?
I’m on giga at home so mainly late night/early morning. It’s crap. In the office I’m on Sparq - and it’s good. I also use my friends computer sometimes - that’s hinet - and thats good also.
For example - takes 3-5 minutes to get into hotmail with giga and about 10 secs with sparq.
I couldn’t get on sparqnet at home before - anybody know if they cover Banchiao now?
I’m on giga cable modem and I have the same problems. (one way cable in, telphone line out. Darn expensive.)
Their time out is always taking for ever with international connections. Even loading Segue takes a while. Hotmail takes forever. Cnn is like way back with a 28K modem.
Chunghwa Adsl is much better, I know because I had it at the office. I can’t get adsl at my home because i’m living to far from the main telephone hub.
My guess is that giga can’t keep up with the growth and they don’t invest fast enough in more capacity.
A Taiwanese guy who knows about computer stuff told me that Taiwan doesn’t have enough channels to lay fibre optic cables. One of the reasons is that it has a poorly developed subway system. In London, Paris, Tokyo and New York, the extensive subway, overground railway and sewer systems provide a ready-made network for laying all sorts of cables. London also has submerged rivers and special tunnels used by the Post Office to convey mail between sorting offices.
Does anybody know whether Taiwan has any cables running directly to mainland China? I think undersea cables to Fuzhou and Xiamen would help spread the load.
Giga is complete rubbish. I used their 768/128 ADSL package for 1 year and at the time I thought it was ok coz ive never used ADSL before. Day time speeds were fine, to all places, then night time and the weekends you could forget it. Playing online games on US servers was impossible, packet loss, low pings you name it I got everything, it was unbearable. Then after moving I joined Hi Net. I know people say Sparq is good and I believe them, but Hi Net also kicks some serious arse and so it should esp since they are in bed with Chung Hwa. Cancel it and get Hi Net
I strongly recommend Sparq, it doesn’t matter if you live in Banchiao or elsewhere, you can still use CHT ADSL line, but use Sparq backbone to reach Internet, this is the so-called Off-Net, call them and I can assure you that you’ll be much more faster than Hinet
My Hinet ADSL connection worked fine for months. Over the last few weeks, however, I have been able to logon as usual but it’s slower than the prepaid dial-up I bought from 7-11–much slower: in fact, it’s constipated, especailly at night.
Slower than dialup very weird. I won’t sit here and play stupid I know the amount of users on HiNet is growing quickly but my speeds are still good. I’m on the 1.5/384 plan and I easily download at 100k/sec and more from fserves/ftps in the USA. Other places may very but my average download speeds are from 50k - 100k or more. I havent noticed any slowdown with my connection.
Yesterday afternoon, I downloaded about 300 megs off Kazaa, my connection was zooming. But today it’s almost dead once again; and last night, like the last few nights, it was.
Alleycat well im in Kaohsiung now. I was in Ku-ting on this HiNet plan and had similar speeds there. I think slower than dialup speeds is a big problem. Did you call up HiNet to abuse I mean ask them what’s going on?
kazaa is really weird for me. most of the time it crawls. like tons slower than just a regular download from a us site. then once in a while when i’m searching for chinese songs, i’ll hit someone in taiwan and get blazing fast speeds. i wish there was a way to limit searches by country so i could only hit taiwan users. their bandwidth sort doesn’t work that well for me.
you’d think with such a huge computer industry there’d be better connections to the outside world. i’m not sure another pipe to china would help that much, but some more pipes to japan(which i assume has a ton of pipes to the us) would definitely help. as it stands now, when i play the ut2k3 demo(anyone know when the retail game will make it here?), i get better pings to servers in illinois than to the tokyo servers. go figure…
Flipper your on Giga right? Well thats the reason it crawls. I really cant stress that enough. As soon as I used Hi Net I realized how stupid I was for sticking with Giga for a year. I’m not saying your stupid ok But I just felt like a complete dumb arse. I “assumed” Giga would be ok but its just shocking. Taiwan traffic is fine. But the Giga link to the outside world SUCKS. This isnt the case with Hi Net and ok Sparq I know you said its a hassle to change your contracts, but if it doesnt incur any cost/fine I really suggest doing it. Go Hi Net or Sparq and you’ll feel like a new man/woman UT2k3? Just download it… I think you dont need a unique cd key to play online, but that was only just after it was released. They may have their cd-key server up checking now if your cd-key is valid etc.
Today I needed more 15 min to download a windows update package (3.3mb)on giga net cable modem. Shouldn’t be longer than 30 seconds.
Getting a segue page took almost 1 min.
What are they doing, are they going back to the 28k era.
They are telling me for 3 years now, next month you’ll have two way cable … yeah bullshit.
This connection costs me a fortune, almost 4000NT$ a month.(my phone connection include)
So, keep your hands of the giga crap. People should tell Microsoft what crappy partners they have.
And almost every month I get e-mails to let me know that they are upgrading their system, … right downgrading you mean.
Go for Hinet adsl or sparq as some people suggest.
ok, now that we’ve established that giga sucks, anyone know how expensive it is to switch? and how long it would take? after another weekend of agonizingly slow download times, i’m frustrated enough that i’m considering it now. what kind of fees are involved with breaking a contract(it’s a year contract and i’ve been on it for about 5-6 months)? how long would it take to get hinet to install their stuff? any special deals going on right now?
Switching costs I dont know sorry. But this is how I see it. The ADSL line fee is paid to CHUNG HWA (edit my bad), so your not breaking any contract there, because you still want to use the ADSL line, you just don’t want Giga as your ISP. So then I guess it depends on Giga, do they have contracts or can you stop at anytime. I used ADSL with Giga for about 9 months in Taipei. When I moved and wanted to stop using it all I just got i cancelled. Amazingly there was no fine or anything, mainly because I didnt get a free line installed with ADSL, the deal Chung Hwa has running now or had before. Anyway best I can think of is check Giga in regards to their contracts. Sorry I’m a useless monkey.
