Korean Job Discussion Forums

[butterface]

What is the cheapest some of you guys are paying for internet access? I found some places that about 40K a month, but that seems expensive. It there a way to get it cheaper?

[mishlert]

I live in the boonies(90 minutes from Seoul) and I pay about 35,000 to Hanafoss.
When the guy came to hook it up I was given 3 options and I chose the 3rd one; super high speed.
If I remember correctly, the cheapest one was 28,000.

[eamo]

I'm just about to be connected to the ABN cable TV company who are offering internet for 13,000 per month.

[ulsanchris]

i want cable. i hate adsl

[applepie]

thrunet, 33,000 won. they have two options 40,000 is the expensive one and theoretically faster. But when I regularly get downloads in the 300-400kbs range and occaisonally as high as 1mb I don't complain.

additionally thrunet has English service. http://www.thrunet.com

[Derrek]

I had Thrunet last year. Back then when I signed up, the speeds were supposed to be the same, and the only difference was that they put ads in your email or something. I never once saw an ad, because I never used their e-mail address server. Speeds were 100k to 350k on the faster average.

Thrunet is currently gone -- sold out to another name. I forget who has it... Cable & Multimedia, maybe?

I'm currently signing up in a new location -- a real pain to have someone else do for you.

[applepie]

[Gord]

[FlagWaver]

www.speedguide.net

(you can download patches, etc - do speedtests, etc.)

www.dslreports.com

[BTM]

Flawless 1.5Mb DSL, 24,500 won I think, long contract/wifey discounts, Megapass.

VDSL isn't that much more expensive, and you're talkin' 10Mb and higher connections. Yowsa.

[ulsanchris]

I want cable internet. I hate my adsl conection. its too slow.
What's faster cable or Vdsl.

[denz]

[BTM]

In a nutshell (and anyone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here) cable is dependant on what's called the 'local loop'. There is a fixed amount of bandwidth to the 'neighbourhood' (might be your building or whatever) and that bandwidth is shared.

So if Joe Download is sucking down a movie or two, and so are his buddies Bum Suk Download and In Hee Download on the same local loop, you're going to see your bandwidth suffer.

With DSL, if the service is working (and I'm at my second house in Korea, this time a villa as opposed to an 'apart', and I've had less than 1 hour outage in two years), you get exactly what you pay for. Some people have reportedly had problems with DSL here, but I never have, so caveat emptor. (Granted I'm an IT guy, and an inveterate tweaker. You can have the best connection in the world and some minor hardware or software glitch can make it suck for you. Best strategy is to find a buddy who'll Tweak For Beer!)

The short-n-skinny is that a 10Mb or higher VDSL line, if it works as well as my *DSL hookups have (properly configured, tested, tweaked), will kick the living crap out of your best cable connection, 99 times out of 100.

I'm reasonably sure of this, but I invite other geekazoids to comment...

[mack the knife]

BTM,

FLOODERDOOBLES!! The guy who installed our VDSL informed us that we are in fact connected to some sort of localized network that works in a very similar manner with a cable hook-up. In other words, my juice is gettin' sucked dry by the wanks living next door, and above, and below (who yell and fight all the time...bastards). Case in point, during vacations (recently) and holidays, it's always slower. Much, much slower. In fact, I usually get the "Page not found" message regardless of the website I'm logging onto.

Granted, I'm living in an ah-paht (kill the scum for konglish-izing that one) surrounded by miles and miles of similar hives.

I should also mention, your physical distance from the network master control center brain thingy unit (for lack of techie terminology) also affects the speed (this tidbit also from our fearless installator).

[BTM]

That's true about the distance thing - if you're more than x (1 km? I can't remember) from the exchange, you get signal degradation with *DSL.

I have heard something about shared (non-cable) pipes into Apart complexes, but never really found out how that's meant to work.