Chile Forum

tombrad2 wrote:Don´t worry, It is absolutely fair and legal that you attach your own router to your Internet connection, just plug it!

not only is it legal.. its recommended!

anyone else with Telefonica CTC got their connection speed tripled?.. got a call this morning letting me know that my banda ancha was being tripled in speed.. also seen the Ads on TV reagring the triple speeds in Banda Ancha... whats changed?

by the looks VTR is doing the same.. what gives?.. dont get me wrong.. higher speeds are great news esp at no extra cost... BUT is it just blowin hot air?

You guys are right, that's pretty cool! Hadn't heard of it, thanks for the heads up, there are more details here:
http://vtr.com/productos/src/home/internet/index.php
http://www.vtr.com/promociones/aumentovelocidad.php
http://www.telefonicachile.cl/3v/

VTR's 10Mpbs plan is still retarded in how it's cap though, but I'll gladly take 4Mbps instead of 2 starting around March 18. If my Tutopia dsl moves from 4Mbps to 6 (which it should since Tutopia is really a Telefonica reseller in Viña), the aggregated 10Mbps will start to be decent.

There is a bandwidth war going on. Kind of like a price war. VTR was loosing a bunch of clients to telefonica, so they started uping their bandwidth. Of course it never occurred to them to save the bandwidth and up their customer service, which is why they where really loosing clients.

I guess they both just upgraded their networks. I still have not tested both my vtr and telefonica connections to see which is which, but as yet to see a difference. The real test for all of us is which provides better connections outside of Chile. Telefonica was curbing their foreign connection speeds. So, everyone run a speed test and report back if you can.

Read the Santiago Times article on this.

One cynical watcher said that this is to prepare for the selling of digital TV (need a min 512 Kbps).

It is very easy for companies to announce speeds increment of Megabites per second, because they are not obliged to guarantee nothing and people seldom use in the real world such high speeds. Normal consumers can do it fine with 300 Kb/s, no more is needed to the daily use. They can offer you increase to 10 Mb/s and then they increase your actual segmentation from 10 to 50, and you will be more or less the same in the bottom line.

This is the speed from your computer to the ISP server only, as Charles said the relevant is the international link to overseas, where most of servers we use are located. The international connection is pretty the same for all ISPs because all they connect to the same backbones and they have similar policies for share the bandwidth (a home user ALWAYS share his connection), No Chilean ISP can guarantee more than 2 Mb/s (down) of international access, this is for premium customers non-segmented, for normal home users with luck may have 1 Mb/s of international access.

So, for a home user with a normal connection the max useful speed between his home and ISP is 1 to 2 Mb/s, any increase over this speed is lost in the bottleneck of the international access

Tom, what you're saying is true in the case of a download from a single source, say ftp'ing from a US server. However with distributed P2P downloads you route around these limitations because you have dozens of concurrent downloads. When I'm really aggressive with emule and bittorrent downloads I can max out my 4Mbps adsl line.

I am hoping that you can give me some insight into how PPPoE ADSL service works here in Chile when you attach your own router to the companies modem.

The place that I am currently staying has Speedy (Terra) and I was hoping to contract Tutopia in my new apartment. I have attempted to use my D-Link DI-524UP router with the Speedy connection, but cannot seem to get connected to the internet. Is this a normal problem or will it be something that I can easily resolve with Tutopia?

Thank you for your assistance.

it should configure just like your normal computer through the browser interface. It should have a setting to clone the mac address if needed. I have not used terra in a while, so I have not idea about their current hardware setup. Just guessing here.

Tom is right on the money. I as yet to see anything like 1 mb a second downloads from bit torrent in Chile on either my vtr or telefonica connection under any conditions. Sure you are reading the right stat? Also much has to do where the computers are you are connecting to. I get blazing speed if it is something popular in south america, and generally with spanish speakers, from torrent sites geared towards latin america. The trick might be to surf torrent sites in spanish, to get in to torrents with lots of latin american users. I am convinced that they are bandwidth shaping, and at different times a day, for different protocols.

admin wrote:I as yet to see anything like 1 mb a second downloads from bit torrent in Chile on either my vtr or telefonica connection under any conditions. Sure you are reading the right stat?

Lol, yeah, I'm pretty sure I look at the right stat. I have a dedicated desktop app to monitor traffic coming in my router, look at firewall logs and so on. Traffics to my WAN ports is even graphed over time. I've downloaded as much as 4GB in one night. Launch downloads for 5 or 6 files worth 700MB each, boom they're done the next morning. They just have to be popular seeds, exotic stuff seeded by 3 people can take weeks to complete, but it's got nothing to do with bandwidth issues.

I don't bother with Latin American trackers as I'm looking for programming in English and might have different tastes. Chilean users on Facebook are big on Prison Break or Heroes while I'm currently watching a bunch of other shows such as Firefly or Damages that probably no one has heard of here, not to speak of obscure Japanese movies.

Tutopia will provide you PPPOE settings if you ask. Here they are for the record (at least that's what's used for Megavia) :

VPI / VCI: 8/32
Service: br_8_32
Protocol: Bridge
Encapsulation: LLC/SNAP-BRIDGING

Yea the time it takes is likely more meaningful than all the stat checking web sites. 700 mb file with good seeds and leaches mix I can get in about 1-2 hours typically. A linux distro, with good corporate network seeding and leachers at around 3-4 gigs can come down in about 2-6 hours. An episode of say the daily show, with like 10,000 seeders and leachers at around 150 to 300 mb will be down in less time than it takes me to watch the previous episode. These would likely be my best performing. There are all kinds of reasons for any given one to be faster or slower, that has nothing to do with the local ISP.

still havent noticed a change in speed.. got told my speed would triple within 72hours.. that was about 96 hours ago.. perhaps it will be 72 chilean hours.. which is about a week..

same here. No difference on either telefonica or VTR. I hope this does not become just another empty marketing promise, that they forgot to inform their systems admins about. Worse might be, if everyone starts thinking they have more bandwith, clogging their oversold networks.

Let's keep an eye out. Please report in if you see a difference, and the region or city you are in so we can track it.

Again, I would just be glad if they upgrade me to what I paid for.

Hello Everyone - Here in Santiago I have both Telefonica and VTR (I personally love my VTR but thats just me) and my speeds have doubled on both accounts, but only nationally. Internationally of course they have remained the same.

Here at home I use VTR:

Chile Speed Test:

To Canada Speed Test:

To London, UK Speed Test:

Within Chile the speed is spot on, internationally you will notice about a 1MB difference. When I go back into my office I will run a test with Telefonica