Internet access in Pattaya - WiFi and GPRS

I'm on holiday in Thailand which has become an annual thing for me and thought I'll make a few posts while I'm at it to revive this blog. I spend most of my holiday in Pattaya since I know the city well and all the night life is concentrated into the beach road, second road and the Jomtian road.

This time around I brought my laptop in the hope of getting some work done and it was important that I had WiFi access. Arriving in Pattaya I stayed at a hotel off Road 3 (Sai Sam) and had a good Wifi signal to a hotspot called info-pattaya. They had several packages ranging from 3 hours of access to 1 month. The bandwidth was based on the package and it varied from 512 kbps to 2048 kbps download. A weeks access was around 14 USD with a download speed of 1024 kbps which was pretty cheap. I was able to pay with my credit card on the http://www.hotspotsystem.com site. They aslso accept paypal I believe.

Sadly I had to change hotels and I moved to a hotel about 200 meters away near Road 2 (Sai Song). In the new hotel I could not get a good signal to any hotspot even though there were 5 or 6 in range. So I used my backup plan which was GPRS access over a DTAC sim card. They offer unlimited GPRS access for 40 bhat (1.3 USD) a day. Remember you have to call the DTAC center and request the unlimited GPRS package else they will charge you by the kilobyte which can be a bit expensive if you do a lot of browsing.

GPRS speeds are ok for email and web browsing (around 50 - 124 kbps I believe) but not recommended for hardcore work like what I wanted to do (Connecting to remote database servers etc...) . I haven't done anywork in the 8 days I have been here so far and I don't think I will do any in the next week either :).

So if you are in Pattaya you might get lucky with having access to a free or cheap WiFi hotspot from your room as there are so many around or if you move around a lot and just needs access to emails and internet browsing, spend a few hundred bhats on a prepaid SIM card and get the unlimited GPRS package activated from the shop you buy the sim card.

Another tip if you are planning to use WiFi is to request for a room in a higher floor.