I just arrived in Vietnam an hour ago, and finally checked in to the hotel. On the bus ride to the hotel, I realised how true naming Vietnam country of motorcycles is. The bikes are exactly like critters running all over the place!
The view from my hotel room
I was expecting not to have any internet connectivity, but it seems that there’s a little luck on my side. The hotel’s internet access rate is charged at US$0.85/minute, and there’s definitely no way I’m going to pay for that. Thankfully, I happened to chance upon a wireless network. The signal’s extremely weak, and the speed reminds me of the days back on a 56kbps modem. Still, crappy internet access is always better than no internet access, so I shall end my complaints about the Vietnam’s internet here. All I can hope for is the wireless network to be available throughout my entire stay.
Vietnam’s an hour behind of Singapore, so it’s around 11.30pm here. I just ate my dinner, which horrendously sucked. Damn, I’m still hungry and the other food stalls are all closed for the night. I think I’ll just go to bed and fill up with tomorrow’s breakfast.
Damn, I miss Devil May Cry 4 >_>
Welcome to Vietnam ^_^
Just an advice for next time
Don’t use internet in the Hotel, you can get the internet access all over internet cafes around with the price 0.20$/HOUR - 0.50$/hour, and the speed is about 200kbps, still slow but better than modem :D.
Canikizu > Thanks ^^
Like what canikizu says. I remember staying in the internet cafe for over an hour to use the internets. Much cheaper than what you pay for in the hotel.
Have you seen any cute girls yet? ^^;
The hotel rates are relatively expensive, where I stayed they had 125,000 VND per hour for the Internet. So I passed on that.
As for cuisine, I had some good crabs there, since I stayed close to a river. Though I’m not quite sure if the two are related.
Windbell > Unfortunately, no cute girls yet >_>
Sylon Beta > I haven’t ate anything which was really good. All the food is too sweet for my liking.
I was actually expecting Vietnam to be somewhat like Thailand, but it seems that Thailand is far more developed than Vietnam.
woah u can still tolerate the slow internet speed. If i was me, i’ll be feeling frustrated and definitely give up the idea of using the internet there haha.
Seiryuu > I actually gave up after a while. LOL
Found your post while searching for info re the slow internet between US and Vietnam. I’m in Y Van hotel in Danang. Daily room rate includes unlimited internet, as is common policy here. As a sysadmin, I am poking around and it appears that the packets slow down in Singapore. 20-30% packet loss - that’s a BIG BIG problem. No problem to places like China, but to US there is this Singtel bottleneck. It’s not the Vietnamese carrier in my case.
Singapore must be helping out a bit with some VOIP QoS, because for the most part, voip (skype) and skypeout/in works pretty well. Beware though, as Skype terminated my Skypeout/in after 2 days because they have a terrible fraud unit. They figure a connection from VN with an American credit card is suspicious. Switched to Yahoo Voice to call regular phones, and they had no problem taking my money and charge much less per minute than Skype. Can’t say the quality to a landline with Yahoo is as good (it’s worse) but it’s intelligible. And, at least they have customer service via live chat, something Skype does not offer.