Chile Forum

thanks for that link.. absolute gold.. and the article is quite interesting.. i have also had a thought/question..

are the off peak times better.. are there off peak times. ie after midnight.. luckily (or unluckily) Perth is 12hrs in front of Chile so most of my skype time will be after 9pm -2am.. which hopefully will be at higher connection speeds...

22days.. still got a mountain of stuff to organize before i get there.. the biggest hurdle is transferring money to myself at a low cost..

I'm just a user, no techie here but use my computer a lot. I really don't see a difference between the speed in I had in the US and here in Central Chile, 45 minutes from Santiago. We also pay almost exactly the same price as in the US. We have VTR but I doubt there is much real difference-we were told not to use Telefonica-they were terrible. It did take VTR 2 weeks(and everyday they promised it would be tomorrow!) to hook us up but no downtime or problems since. It seems it's like Qwest or Comcast in Colorado-the decision is usually based on the last experience of someone you knew that used the company but they are probably pretty similar in terms of service.

Broadband seems available anywhere internet is available here yet in the US, there are many areas without broadband still.

Also, I use Yahoo Messenger which is free calling computer to computer and 1 cent a minute calling computer to phone(to Oregon).

We just had Telefonica installed today. ADSL with 2.4 mb connection. Once the sales reps got back to us (about 3 business days), they installed the next day. So far, so good.

The guy that installed it did not give me a bunch of S**T like VTR. In fact he knew immediately when he seen the VTR box why we were dropping it, and told us that telefonica does not mess with their connections like VTR. They leave their connections completely open, no caps, locked mac addresses, and we can swap out their dsl modem for anything we like using international standards. They gave us a nice little generic linux based modem made in China that so far works perfectly. We also got a nice Philips wireless phone.

I also noticed that our neighbors across the street that run off the same poll as us had VTR come and disconnect their cable today. VTR in Temuco is in trouble.

I ran all the speed test, and nailed fairly close to the 2.4 mb on all of them every time. I still have not had time to really take it for a full test drive, but everything is reporting correct at this point. These were the same speed test that VTR has not even come close to hitting what we bought in a month. I am talking about 1/3, not just a little slow.

We now have two connections. We still have the VTR connection as a failover connection, and I am load balancing it to put it to work as much as possible. We are going to run it for about a month and likely drop VTR all together, minus the phone because we need the phone number. If that phone number did not have several thousand dollars in advertising directly associated with it, I would drop it too.

I have never had problems with my Telefonica connections, but I have waisted more hours on the phone trying to get VTR to fix their systems than I can count.

Today we discovered their sales rep lied to us about what they charge for the cell phone control plan, and it turns out it does not even control the cell phone calls.

In terms of DSL vs cable, the thing to remember is that cable is a shared pipe. So, what likely happened here in our area in Temuco is that they oversold (the sales reps at VTR do this a lot), and now there are too many people for the bandwidth allocated to this area. So, when everyone on the street comes home and turns on their computers, the bandwidth tanks. If they are on the ball, the company would allocate more bandwidth to the area, but it is obvious that VTR is not doing it. This was obvious when they could not even get sufficient IP addresses allocated to the area when we first moved in to provide phone service.

They simply cost us too much time and money this year.

We will test Telefonica. I have had several connections from them in the central region without problems. I had one Telefonica connection installed at a client's office in Santiago about 6 years ago, and they have not had a problem in that time. crossing my fingers for the same.

So, I now have two broadband connections, and still very little internet. My wife promptly maxed out both connection with bittorrent, so I am still only surfing the web with a glorified 56kb connection at the end of the day. You can't win.

this is brilliant.. i am so glad i found this forum.. u guys have made a lot of the choices i would normally have had to do on my own so much easier.. more informed choices.. many thanks again!..

Admin,

I'm just curious about the contract length for your new telefonica connection? Are you "locked in" for a long time?

Strangely, the guy who installed never bothered to get my ID or my signature. We applied by fax. That was it. So, we legally (either by mistake or on purpose), have no contract with them. Should have gotten the 4 mb connection.

I'm researching this myself before we come next month. I'm about to buy a Draytek 2910G dual wan modem into which you can plug (by definition) two providers. Since I don't think you can get two DSL providers to serve a single household, I'm planning on getting dsl + cable (besides, cable comes with TV). VTR has a monopoly on cable, right? Anyway I expect to use VTR only as a failover/bandwidth complement. All our business happens through the internet, I'm on Vonage or Skype three hours a day so having constant, relatively fast internet access is vital to us.

As far as dsl is concerned, besides Telefonica, I've found competition from Tutopia, Netline, and Entel, though I'm unsure about their coverage in the region of our choice (Vina de Mar/ConCon). They're all around $45,000 for 4 or 8Mbps downstream, 512 up (when they think about providing upstream bandwidth information at all on their web sites). You'd think competition between half a dozen players would bring prices further down, but it's not that bad by international standards. One reason I've ruled out Uruguay is that they have a state monopoly on broadband (which obviously delivers slow, crappy service). Telsur is introducing a 20Mbps service, hopefully this may help start a little price war if they roll it out to enough customers.

I've read that Tutopia (IFX really) has a better connection to international backbones than most. I guess we'll see when we get there.

Yea, I got my two connections load balanced via a kind of messy Linux firewall and two network card setup. One goes in to my regular router, and plugs in to the linux box and one connection plugs directly in to the linux box from the dsl modem. I then have the option of pointing other computers on the network either directly at the routers connection for a single connection via VTR's 620 kb, or at the Linux firewall to get the load balanced connection of about 3 mb total.

I am sure if I had time I could come up with a more elegant network solution, but this one works for us currently. This is mostly because the Belkin router has proven to be fairly funky. I will likely go for duel connection router also when the chance arises.

All of the companies should be available in the Central region. I believe telmex is offering service also in the central region.

VTR I believe is the monopoly in most of the country. Plug'n Play cable is in Temuco, but with limited deployement.

I do not believe you will have a problem with more than one DSL provider, as it appears everyone has to install and maintain their own lines in Chile. It makes for some really messy telephone poles, and whole lot of cleanup work every time you want to take a photo in a city. You have to brush out the phone lines from an otherwise nice photo. Some of the phone poles look like they are about to fall over from the thousands of pounds of lines hanging off of them.

Interesting comment about how phone lines are deployed. I'm more used to countries where the last mile to the customer is owned by a former state monopoly. Connections to homes are then shared between phone and dsl providers because local loop unbundling (LLU) has been enforced to support competition. I've seen mentions of LLU in Chile but haven't found a conclusive document. Subtel's content about the internet is 4 years old... The TDLC's decision last year in favor of free competition and VOIP is definitely encouraging from a regulatory perspective (ie. enable genuine competition among providers and services).

So if Chilean dsl providers don't share any of their infrastructure, it may be more attractive to combine two of them than dsl and cable, given VTR's skills and internet pricing. I have to look at their TV-only service.

I did notice quite heavy-loaded poles in Santiago and Valpo. Silly me, I thought that was sloppy electrical wiring at work, I didn't think about phone lines.

VTR may suck even for traffic within Chile, as they're one of only three ISPs not connected to the National Access Point. I don't know how they handle .cl traffic, maybe you want to traceroute some local sites to see whether you end up routed through 8 hops in neighboring countries! People posting on Fayerwayer.com also seemed convinced that VTR was using traffic shaping to throttle p2p apps.

As far I can tell VTR does not route anything anywhere.

Seriously though, the .cl traffic seems to be routed inside the country through a lot of private address block hops. This is recent development as we were told they ran out of IP addresses. Everything goes on the public wire in Santiago, even if you are connected in Temuco.

Here is a traceroute off our vtr connection to one of our client's web sites on our server in the States. I just used this one because it was the first .cl that popped in my mind. Thought it might be educational. Checkout the times between hops inside VTR's network, and when you hit the international backbone, and then the U.S. backbone where our server is located.

traceroute to araucaniaandina.cl (209.67.52.125), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 * * *
2 192.168.243.14 (192.168.243.14) 10.709 ms 13.064 ms 18.262 ms
3 192.168.243.233 (192.168.243.233) 18.758 ms 40.881 ms *
4 192.168.15.10 (192.168.15.10) 19.438 ms 21.598 ms 29.614 ms
5 * * *
6 192.168.15.193 (192.168.15.193) 24.063 ms 26.447 ms 24.416 ms
7 te4-4.ar3.SCL1.gblx.net (64.215.25.153) 29.632 ms 34.294 ms 20.147 ms
8 ber1-ge-4-4.losangeles.savvis.net (208.173.55.197) 144.146 ms 144.127 ms 144.160 ms
9 dcr1-ge-1-0-0.losangeles.savvis.net (204.70.193.105) 145.406 ms 147.818 ms 147.563 ms
10 dcr2.dan-so-7-0-0.dallas.savvis.net (204.70.194.54) 187.685 ms 186.964 ms 178.662 ms
11 cr2-pos-0-0-0-0.Atlanta.savvis.net (204.70.192.69) 174.354 ms 176.499 ms 175.125 ms
12 204.70.197.1 (204.70.197.1) 173.324 ms 175.786 ms 175.652 ms
13 cr2-pos-0-0-0-0.Washington.savvis.net (204.70.192.54) 181.255 ms 178.815 ms 172.819 ms
14 cr1-bundle-pos1.NewYork.savvis.net (204.70.196.137) 179.065 ms 175.734 ms *
15 cr2-gig-0-7-5-4.NewYork.savvis.net (204.70.193.81) 407.035 ms 179.550 ms 182.762 ms
16 204.70.197.9 (204.70.197.9) 183.371 ms 198.497 ms 175.489 ms
17 hr1-vlan-240.Weehawkennj2.savvis.net (204.70.197.14) 176.284 ms 174.523 ms 179.727 ms
18 hr2-tenge-13-2.Weehawkennj2.savvis.net (216.35.78.6) 272.868 ms 175.766 ms 177.245 ms
19 204.70.196.74 (204.70.196.74) 176.715 ms 181.023 ms 177.637 ms
20 bhr1-ge-5-0.JerseyCitynj1.savvis.net (204.70.196.82) 175.787 ms 175.762 ms 173.334 ms
21 csr22-ve240.Jerseycitynj1.savvis.net (216.32.223.43) 175.848 ms 175.194 ms 189.995 ms
22 c1.uridium3.net (209.67.28.66) 213.239 ms 179.646 ms 178.009 ms
23 spencerglobalmedia.com (209.67.52.125) 178.454 ms 177.630 ms 179.352 ms

You sure have a bit of bouncing around before they decide to let you out of their network! That said, you're more remote from Santiago than I am from Lisbon (I'm 30 miles from the capital). At least now they're not wasting public IP addresses (they must have figured out we're not in an IPv6 world yet).

Here's mine (I'm uploading/downloading like a happy pig with emule at the same time), 1 hop shorter:

Tracing route to araucaniaandina.cl [209.67.52.125]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms tele2.tele2 [192.168.1.1 <-- this is my router's self-assigned internal IP]
2 69 ms 74 ms 94 ms d83-187-29-1.cust.tele2.pt [83.187.29.1 <-- my ISP's local thing]
3 64 ms 57 ms 8 ms lis-ncore-3.vlan80.swip.net [212.151.169.102 <-- my ISP, lis for Lisbon]
4 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms lis-core-1.gigabiteth2-0.swip.net [130.244.205.189]
5 124 ms 190 ms 204 ms cor1-core.pos9-2.swip.net [130.244.205.157 <-- ISP backbone, don't know where that cor1 box is located]
6 46 ms 44 ms 44 ms par1-core.pos12-0.swip.net [130.244.218.1 <-- ISP backbone in Paris, France]
7 180 ms 204 ms 204 ms ash-core-1.pos4-0-0.swip.net [130.244.218.138 <-- ISP backbone, Ashburn, VA, wow they even cross the Atlantic for me]
8 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms sl-st20-ash-15-3.sprintlink.net [144.223.246.209 <-- Sprint in the US]
9 149 ms 204 ms 204 ms sl-st21-ash-12-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.241]
10 124 ms 195 ms 213 ms cpr1-pos6-0.VirginiaEquinix.savvis.net [208.173.50.165 <-- looks like yours at this point]
11 133 ms 204 ms 204 ms bcs2-so-5-3-0.washington.savvis.net [206.24.227.45]
12 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms cr1-tengig-0-15-0-0.Washington.savvis.net [204.70.196.101]
13 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms cr2-pos-0-0-0-0.NewYork.savvis.net [204.70.192.2]
14 227 ms 203 ms 163 ms 144.232.9.118
15 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms 204.70.197.5
16 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms hr1-vlan-240.Weehawkennj2.savvis.net [204.70.197.14]
17 190 ms 204 ms 204 ms hr2-tenge-13-2.Weehawkennj2.savvis.net [216.35.78.6]
18 227 ms 204 ms 239 ms 204.70.196.74
19 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms bhr1-ge-5-0.JerseyCitynj1.savvis.net [204.70.196.82]
20 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms csr22-ve242.Jerseycitynj1.savvis.net [216.32.223.58]
21 227 ms 204 ms 204 ms c1.uridium3.net [209.67.28.66]
22 225 ms 204 ms 205 ms spencerglobalmedia.com [209.67.52.125]

You'd probably want to test a .cl that you know is hosted in Chile to see whether they figured out some sort of national peering outside of the NAP I was referring too. Not so long ago Tele2 in Portugal didn't have peering and sent requests to Portuguese sites through the UK. I couldn't care less but some locals weren't too pleased