Internet Service

Something we can't seem to do without these days: The Internet.

As you may have read on other posts, the Internet service in Ecuador is not great. Fortunately, most of the time it works well.

The cost is approximately the same as what it is in Canada. We pay $20 (SP:  vente dolares - $20) per month for 5 Mbps (called Megas in Ecuador). There are various other speeds available both slower and faster. The faster speeds get quite expensive.

The main suppliers of Internet service are:

1)   TV Cable
2)   ETAPA
3)   PuntoNet

TV Cable is regarded as the best of the bunch by most expats. I only have one comment from an Ecuadorian that ETAPA is better (from his experience).

Even though TV Cable is regarded as the best of the bunch, their technicians seem not to be trained very well.

Over the last few months we have experienced an intermittent signal quality problem. Sometimes our Internet service is out for 2 or 3 hours at a time and this can occur multiple times per week. Each time the techs come to check it out they never manage to resolve the problem.

On one visit the techs actually determined that there was indeed a signal strength problem and that it was external to the house. On the next visit (different techs), they installed a different splitter as if to say the problem was inside the house.

What amazes me is that they do not seem to record what is done on each visit so that the next set of techs can save themselves some time. Or maybe the case is that they do not believe the test results of their predecessors.

I know for sure the problem is external (SP:  fuera - meaning outside, they also use "afuera") to the house, but convincing the techs of that, with my broken Spanish, is not easy.

The techs that actually determined the problem was external to the house examined the signal strength on the pole outside the house but did not do anything to resolve the problem and never returned to attempt a repair.

Based on another earlier analysis I would guess that the some techs (or maybe all of them) are not well trained and therefore have great difficulty resolving complex problems. Hence the reason for the problems going on and on.

Who knows if we will ever get this problem resolved.

UPDATE (Jan 11, 2015):   They finally resolved the problem in mid-December. We have not had an outage since that time.

I had called them, once again, in December, and they sent out some other techs. This time they also determined there was a signal strength problem external to the house. Finally!! They told me they could not fix the problem, but that it would be fixed later that day.

I don't know when they came or what they did. I was never given any kind of report or phone call. Regardless, the problem seems to be resolved.

Around Jan 6th, we experienced a very bad connectivity problem. This problem was not the same as when the cable modem kept dropping the connection. This time it was severe "packet loss". 

"Packet loss" is basically traffic from and to your computer that gets lost in transit. This "packet loss" manifests itself as your inability to connect to a website (or some other Internet-based service) or where your web-browser takes an excessively long time to present the website webpage content you are attempting to view.

This problem lasted for a good portion of the day (6 or 7 hours). The next day I saw the same condition for about 1 hour. Since then our Internet service has been fine.

Here's hoping it stays that way.

Some people have suggested purchasing a router that will fail over to a backup Internet service if your main one goes out. Such routers are not that expensive (roughly $70). However, it means you have to double the cost of your Internet access charges because you have to maintain Internet service from two different Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This is certainly an option if the Internet is that critical to your life.

Another thing to consider is purchasing a "Business Service" from one of the ISPs. This type of service costs more money, but the ISPs tend to respond to problems in a much more efficient manner than if you purchase a standard Internet connection.