True DSL Update

There are 2 phone companies in Thailand: TOT and TT&T. If you want DSL, you have 3 choices: DSL from TOT, DSL from TT&T, or DSL from a third party who basically rents the DSL connection from TOT or TT&T, depending on which phone service is in your house.

Changing phone companies from/to TOT to/from TT&T is not an easy thing. It's a several month process. Therefore, if you have TOT (like I do), you are kind of stuck with it. (Same for TT&T.)

When True DSL kept blaming TOT for my internet problems, they weren't kidding. When TOT DSL goes down, so do all of the True DSL customers who have TOT phone lines. I could try every single DSL provider in Thailand, but as long as I have a TOT phone line, if TOT goes down, my DSL goes down with it. Therefore, I may as well stick with True Internet Chonburi.

Every morning, over the last 2 days, I have woken up to find my internet down, thanks to TOT. I have missed out on half a day's work 2 days in a row because of this. Last night (this morning in America), to add to my problems, a construction crew in Virginia severed the main internet line to my company, and work was cut off for an additional 4 hours.

The worst problem is that when my DSL goes down, even though I can switch over to dial-up internet, I cannot work: You see, working with medical records requires something that is called a "Virtual Private Network" (VPN). This is nicknamed a "tunnel" because it basically creates a private internet connection between me and my company over the public internet lines. For reasons nobody can explain, two weeks ago, the VPN would no longer connect using a dial-up connection... ANY dial-up connection, of which I have tried 3 different dial-up providers. This is the real problem, and nobody knows how to fix it. My DSL going down used to mean that I just had to work on the slower dial-up. Now it means that I cannot work at all.