Internet quality in Cuenca

expat42451 wrote:

Hello to all

I have been living in Quito the last 2 years. Internet here has progressively grown worse in my neighborhood--my work depends on it being up and stable(streaming data on financial markets). I am using Netlife but in the Orchidias section of Quito it has gone from good to pretty bad. I am considering a move to Cuenca and wonder if anyone would care to comment on  the different ISP's there and how the service is.

Many thanks and regards

Expat

Internet quality is dependent on an ISP infrastructure and not necessarily the city you live in. To put it simply, you can move to Cuenca or anywhere for that matter and have similar bad quality of internet. That is something that is important to understand.

There may be technical reasons why your connection is “progressively getting worse”, but it’s probably because the bandwidth that is allocated to your area is being shared by more people now than it was 2 years ago. This is an indication that your internet provider hasn’t upgraded their infrastructure and as a result you are sharing your speed with more people.

You probably can get better quality internet by remaining in Quito but by moving to an area that has fiber optic internet infrastructure in place. You can also achieve this by moving to Cuenca, and if you’re interested in the latter, Google Cuenca Tech Life, and you’ll find a blog of a knowledgeable and friendly expat who has reviewed probably all ISPs in Cuenca. But beware as I emphasized it’s not about a city but an ISP, so if you want to move to Cuenca, make sure that the area and specifically the residence you intend to move into has fiber optic internet availability. Best of luck.

Hi Vsimple

First thank you  very much for taking the time to post and the interest. It is deeply appreciated.

We have fiber here in Orchidias, Netlife, what I am using now. 2 months ago they replaced all subscriber equipment- the modem and  the Cisco router with a Huawei-    and the problems started. Before this we had almost no outages.   I agree with your assessment  as well about the infrastructure bandwidth allocations possibly being at or near capacity. We loose internet several times a day for periods of from 1-2 minutes. I am connected to Netlife via an ethernet cable through the  Huawei (Netlife  supplied and adminned) router, I suspect that  either the  router is crashing or the problem may be elsewhere on the other side of their  modem. Netlife swapped the Huwaei out for another,  same model. The problem remained. Difficult  to depend on streaming financial data when it disappears intermittently at various times. Occasionally I also have DNS problems using their locally provisioned  DNS server but have for the most part eliminated that by manually setting   another DNS server on the connection (Google or one of the other worldwide DNS services)  which seems to help that part of the problem but not the connection going down.  So it goes.


Thanks very much as well for the pointer to the blog reviewing the ISP's in Cuenca.   I will take a look at that and try to evaluate what may be next. .

Again, many thanks for your kindness and interest.

Regards from Quito

Expat

What indications do you see when you start to experience problems?

What lights are on, on the router when this happens?

Does Netlife use a cable modem between your router and their outside equipment?

If you can give me the IP address of your router I can do some tests from here (Cuenca) and give you an idea of where the problem is. If you prefer not to share it via this forum send me a direct message. To do that click on my name (MikeGB) and then click on Send a Message.

Hi Mike

First of all please accept my sincerest apologies for not replying earlier to your kind offer.

Last couple of weeks we have been occupied  trying to find another suitable place to live....so rather than involve your time with something that will not have much meaning in hopefully a week or two,lets hold off until we are settled.

Again many kind thanks for your offer and again please accept my apology for not getting back to you sooner.

Regards from Quito