Chile Forum

tonyakaserg wrote:

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote: you will have to be your own techie as genuine Mac support is nearly non-existent with the Chile banda ancha providers.

thought as much.. oh well.. will have to wait and see.. tackle each problem as it comes..

This is so so so so true! Since I´ve been in Chile I´ve had 3 internet accounts (all with telefonica, and they seemed to have no problem with me being a foreigner since I had a Chilean ID card). I have always used mac, and in my first apartment they brought me a router that didn´t work with MAC, but then they came the next day and gave me a compatible one and sent a guy who actually knew how to set it up on my computer. But with the other two instalations, I had to show the "tech" how to install them. About a year ago I got a nice wireless router and just installed it myself of course, and have had no problems since...just be sure to lock it with a password or all your neighbors will be "borrowing" your internet.

yea, I don't even mention to the installers I am running linux. I also never use their routers, and firewall their modems using my own routers. You should never get anything from them that is not industry standard.

My tel sur connection also provided my TV for a while (nothing to watch). We recently dropped them in favor of direct TV, and as soon as I unplugged their funky wireless system all the electromagnetic interference with phones and other routers disappeared. I had tried to tweak the frequencies, but no help. Getting rid of them was the only solution. It had gotten so bad that when the cell phones would get a call incoming, all of our monitors would start humming several seconds before the phone.

Let us know if you have any difficulties with DirectTV, beyond the norm during heavy storms. It is the TV option I am most considering. I will post the results of my conversation with Gtd Manquehue regarding FTTH service in Santiago, when I talk to them in the next several days.

direct tv has been great so far. I am a total information junky, so it is nice to get things like bloomberg and the science channels in English.

It has been a while since I did a speed test.

I now have 2.46 Mb/s on the download and .63 Mb/s on the upload.

Yea, I have not run a test in a while. It has been fairly solid for so long, I can of forget. 99.0% of my problems are DNS related, and most of that has nothing to do with the ISP in Chile (or I have at least I removed them from having any responsibility for it).

I did discover this week that I have found serious problems with the latency and errors from opendns.com. They are now throwing errors to make money, because when they do not return a result you land on their advertising page. If your dns is important, better to google for another trustworthy resolving DNS server. I have my own dns servers, and catches, but had one of my office routers set to opendns from a long time ago, and discovered I was getting all kinds of flaky results for some publicly addressable domain names used for internal purposes. Reset to a new upstream resolving name serve, and all the problems are gone. Still better than the stale DNS issued by most ISP in Chile.

I would highly recommend for those that need the speed however, to get a cheap router and flash it with Tomato or DD-wrt open firmwares, or even install caching dnsmasq on your computer. Caching 5000 domains on your local network, especially as a foreigner that tends to visit foreign websites that may not be popular in Chile, the speed will be much more snappy and even occasional local ISP outages of services may not even be noticed. I would say it adds something from 10%-30% more speed and reliability to my connections since i started running my own dns cache.

Well, at least i know where to go looking for certain problems, and it eliminates the hours of guess work out of a bad connection.

admin wrote:I would highly recommend for those that need the speed however, to get a cheap router and flash it with Tomato or DD-wrt open firmwares, or even install caching dnsmasq on your computer.

Sounds like a plan. My 802.11b Linksys router that predates WPA could probably do with upgrading anyway...

James.

yea, I have replaced all of my routers with models that can be flashed. I have a Buffalo and two linksys. One of my linksys is the linux version that was bought particularly to be flashed. The other was just a regular linksys. It can be flashed, but I had some problems getting the PPPOE client to work for DSL. I think it was just a buggy model.

I use Tomato firmware. DD-WRT is good, but it just had way too many junk options to deal with that I do not need. The tomato interface was just much simpler and straight forward, yet has all the advanced features. Most of the time when I am messing with a router it is because something has broken badly in the network, and I am in hurry. Most importantly, when I am doing something remote on router at the office, I do not want to make a mistake and get cut off from the router and have to physically go reset it. Less is more many times.

One really nice feature that most routers don't seem to come with and is important in Chile is the ability to scan the neighborhood for other wireless devices running, and the channels they are on. You can then reset your wireless channel to put more signal separation between your router and all the rest. Most of the ISP's in Chile now install with a wireless router of some sort and they tend to leave them on the default channel 6. So for example near our house there is about two dozen wireless routers on channel 6 (of course all using WEP encryption). Even spookier is our office building is in the same situation. All the neighboring offices have just the default installed routers with WEP encryption. I refused to accept a modem with a wireless connection built in to it that I could not turn off.

We where having serious problems with EM interference with our other wireless devices (cell phones, cordless, etc). When the cell phone would ring we would get feedback through computer speakers several seconds before the phone made any noise. Once I changed the router channel all that went away. The nice thing is there are typically about 10-12 channels free in an area, as everyone else is piled on to channel 5 or 6.

I just changed apartments and got my transferred banda ancha connection installed on the day after I moved (I moved on a Sunday). Very impressive. In fact, they were so eager to setup the new connection that they called twice before we moved (we gave them a week's notice) that they could install it the day of each call Too bad we hadn't moved yet or why they couldn't wait till the official day we gave them

Minuses:
They claim that the line from the previous apartment will be active for 10 days. If I still have the key in a week, I may go down there with my telephone, ADSL modem and laptop to see if this is the case.
The tech by default tried to install their crappy wifi router. When I reviewed the configuration page and twice tried to change the encryption to WPA, it did not save the change and blew out the configuration. I said no-way to this piece of crap and insisted on a basic ADSL modem. He replaced it with a Huwei ADSL modem.

Hi guys

Does anyone know whether Entel is still offering fixed broadband (DSL)? For some reason I can't find any plans advertised on their website. A few months ago they had many. Quite a mystery.. Have they switched to mobile broadband only?

Thanks...
Jola

Interesting thread

I'm about to move to Chile from China - should I buy I router here before i come? Any particular model?

charlescellist wrote:Interesting thread

I'm about to move to Chile from China - should I buy I router here before i come? Any particular model?

Good router selection at pcfactory and probably other places here.

http://pcfactory.cl/?papa=282&categoria=88