While I was over sea in Thailand, I was worry about having access to the internet and I was worry if my web sites would even load fast enough. When I first arrive in Bangkok I was living with my brother in his condo without internet, but I would go out and pay to use internet at the local internet café. It cost about 50 cent per hour, the price vary depending where you are. The most expensive internet café I have seen in Thailand was $2 dollars per hour and that was on the beachfront in Pattaya.
When I finally have my own hotel room in Pattaya, I stayed in a hotel called Prima Place, south of Pattaya near 3rd Road. I got a wireless internet connection with the local computer store. The internet provider was Maxnet. The first week with Maxnet was fine, there were no disconnection, and it was a little slow because of the wireless signal. However, after about the first week I was constantly getting disconnected or cannot connect to the internet. Sometime it would take hours for me to connect or extremely slow and sometime I did not use the internet for the entire day. It was very frustrating to say the least.
This was the main reasons I did not continue to stay at that hotel because I only had one internet provider with Maxnet. When it was time to pay the rent, I decided not to stay and I decided to move out to another location with a different internet provider. I ended up staying at a place called Villa Mama, which happens to be much cheaper than my last place but smaller. Also, they offered free wifi.
The free wifi was with an internet provider called Cat Telecom. This internet provider was much better when I was with Maxnet. Cat telecom never went offline, although it did go offline in two different occasions, but the offline happened because of the rain. Other than that, I had no issues. On the other hand, Maxnet goes offline with or without rain. I would stay away from Maxnet from now unless I don’t have much of a choice or maybe it was my bad luck and Maxnet signal was not that great in my area.
Either way, many people complain about both companies. Some people prefer one more than the other. You can do some search and find tons of forums where people chat about internet providers over n Thailand.
For now, I’ll stick with Cat telecom.
I used to agree with what you have said here. The advertising of "maximum" speeds are all nonsense in this country, companies advertising 8Mbps (maximum) … so if you are the only person in the town on the net you will get 6Mbps is what that means. However CAT was the only company to admit that such promises to everyone is impossible, which is why I always liked them, until lately. It seems that in the middle of 2010, with the introduction of their "use anywhere dongle" that the land line speeds that i really used to rave about have completely diminished. CAT sucks just as bad as Maxnet (well probably not Maxnet changes the name of the company every couple months) but TOT, 3BB, CAT, TTT, all of them are crap….. so it doesn't matter who you choose, i just prefer CAT because they don't lie to you… they know they are crap, and tell you up front.