Thanks Alan. I saw an HGC access hatch in Main Street last week for what must be the 100th time - and registered what it must mean for the first...

I went to their website and sent a message to the customer service people asking what the plans for Lamma are but no reply as yet, which isn't surprising.

Lets wait and see.

I moved my box to stretch the mini-aerial onto the TV antenna and nearly doubled the reception:



Next step cantenna - cheers for the tip Alan.

I've been unable to get anything from HGC about their plans for Lamma despite several attempts.

BUT!!! there's a new HGC Broadband manhole cover been installed outside Granny Chan's shop in the past few days. This is less than 50m from my flat (as the mole tunnels) so I'm hopeful

Anyone else heard anything?

On another note - I recently changed my mobile from 3 to smartone, and the signal strength is significantly worse - so I'm definitely sticking with Netvigator till something better comes along.

There are a few more HGC hatches on the way to the beach. I suspect (and hope) that they may use HKE's tunnel for their uplink; rather than the microwave link all the other ISPs use.

And as we have crappy mobile reception in Tai Wan, I'm certain HSPA will be crummy if it works at all.

Hello

We are about to move to Lamma (yippee) and we are thinking about internet. I noticed that the smartone mobile picks up decent(ish) downloads - do you know what the reception is like with three mobile?

thanks

From the Speedtest thread.



Nothing much you can do on your PC to affect the Internet access speed; the bottleneck is the local connection and the uplink to HK.

With more and more people sucking down movies, streaming TV and God knows what else, it's getting pretty stretched.

Any news on the optic broadband?

Coming from a 50mb connection in the UK to 3mb here is starting to irritate. It feels like dial up.

No announcements at all, though they're still laying fibre, most recently on the path to Sok Kwu Wan.

I just called PCCW and spoke to a really nice guy in their sales team. He said that the only package available is a 3Mb package. When I asked him if this was enough to video skype, he checked with a few colleagues and said "no". Fair play to them for being honest about it.

We currently have a Vodafone Smartone dongle which is awful. Best download speeds are about 800Kb and upload speeds are at a crawl. It is enough for Skype voice calls but that's about it.

Should I tie myself in for that little extra bandwidth and be stuck to them for 24 months or wait (maybe indefinitely) for HGC?

HGC is still digging and laying cable, no idea when they'll go live.
Last noticed them halfway to Sok Kwu Wan.

Otherwise, one2free/CSL also has HSPA wireless on Lamma. Like all such depends on your reception. A friend in Sha Po is getting a good signal.

I remember when he was trying out Vodaphone, he could access the router's config pages, which had a signal strength section, that also included signals from other phone companies. Maybe you can look at that and have an idea if one2free might be better. If you just have a USB dongle that may not work.


I'm sticking with Pacific Internet, $168/month for DSL, at least till HGC makes their move.

Thanks. I tried calling Pacific Internet's hotline and he said they do not do any more residential subscriptions and that the business subscriptions were uncompetetive compared to what PCCW could achieve.

PCCW seems to be the only wired option then. Just don't know whether it would be worth committing just to find out it's not fast enough for Skype :-s

Yes, it looks like they're gettng out of the domestic business.
Sad, they are quite professional.


Have a look at the Speedtest thread.

A few other possibilities:
Onebb: http://www.onebb.com/sc_webcat/ecat/cms_view.php?lang=1&top=1&web_id=1021

New World https://www.newworldtel.com/tc/customer-services/online-service-subscription/consumer-customers.html

Both these companies were offering DSL on Lamma earlier. That should be identical to the PCCW service as they use the same underlying network.

Today I saw a couple of guys splicing cables in the HGC manhole outside Granny chans.

We had a brief broken chat about what they were doing and the upshot was that the fibre is for "all Lamma" and the expected finish date is "end five month". whether that's the end of May, or 5 months from now is beyond my Cantonese skills - but I'm hopeful.

so they use English to answer? 'five' 'month'?

When I'm downloading stuff during the day I limit the torrent speed so I can use the connection for other stuff.
Then, if I remember, I take off the limit at the end of the day and allow the torrents to max out the download speed.

The other day (midnight Friday evening) I 'd been limiting the speed to 100kB/s. but when I took off the limit the speed remained exactly the same.
I was connected to multiple seeds for that torrent so it was not a case of the source limiting the speed.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I was just speaking to Andy. (My computer had literally blown up, a pretty shower of sparks and smoke as the power supply shorted out.) He said that the Hutchison people had told him they had stopped work on installing their network here because "some residents complained about the noise".

This sounds idiotic, HGC already have put their trunk lines all through the village and at least part of the way to Sok Kwu Wan. Someone is covering up something. Maybe some local big wheels were angling for tea money and holding it up with such complaints.

Otherwise, he said a new 4G LTE antenna is going up at Po Wah Yuen to connect with HK, presumably. That should increase the local capacity, though which networks will have access I don't know. Hopefully all, but PCCW might try to keep the others at a lower level.

Hi,

I'm trying to set up broadband and home phone. The PCCW guy claims the best they can do is 3M for $238/month. I know the speed is what it is, but are there bargaining avenues for getting a better deal? Any better options than Netvigatior? Thanks!