Is anyone else out there having problems with internet service in Southern Viet Nam? My wife is in Tien Giang and we are having major problems communicating. The Government, which appears to be the only service provider in the area, says that they are replacing a line in My Tho. It's been going on around a week now.

Mark

Thi has't had any problems with the internet when she chats with her family in HCMC. She chats with them every night.

Peter and Thi

I-129F Sent : 2007-05-26
I-129F NOA1 : 2007-06-11
I-129F RFE(s) :
RFE Reply(s) :
I-129F NOA2 : 2007-10-26
Touched: 2007-11-02
NVC Recieved: 2007-11-16
Consulate recieved ??????
Packet 3 sent 2007-12-11
Packet 3 received 2007-12-24
Packet 3 returned 2007-12-28
Packet 4 sent 2008-1-14
Email Reply with Interview Date 2008-1-23
Interview Date 2008-2-27
Passed Interview 2008-02-27
Visa Pick Up Date 2008-3-05
Received Visa 2008-2-29 (called to pick up earlier)
POE 2008-3-05 Los Angeles

The infrastructure is obviously better there, not to mention the competition. This is getting real frustrating!

Tell her to go to HCM city to chat with you.
My wife lived in Tieng Giang b4 too /

Thanks for the advice, but that's a 3 hour trip! If it continues much longer she may be moving back there though. This is unacceptable. 10 days and counting.

she may make it as an excuse . You should fly back to investigate the situation. My brother in law in Tieng Giang has been chatting with me everyday.

Uh...no. I would love to fly back and be with her, but this is not an excuse. I have a friend there and he was having the same problem. They finally got it fixed (sort of). It was actually a problem in Cai Be. It's a miracle they have service in that place at all.

It may be that there are some cases where people are making excuses, but the fact is that internet service in Vietnam generally sucks. I know this from long daily experience. I do have one friend in Saigon, and I have never had a problem talking with him on the internet (though his cell phone really sucks as far as sound quality). But in Hanoi, and I imagine in outlying areas, that dang internet is always on the blink. Between that and power failures, it makes life less than pleasant sometimes.

It is getting to be summertime, and that means more power failures. When I was there last summer, the power would fail 2 or 3 times a day. It even happened during our engagement ceremony, with a house crammed full of people. Luckily, my future brother-in-law came to the rescue and brought a radiator fan out of a Toyota. He hooked it up to a car battery, and we at least had some air moving again! Good old Vietnamese ingenuity.

The internet and power in Vietnam is a problem even in HCMC. On every trip (March 2007, September, Feburary 2008) I went on, the power went off at Khanh's house where I was staying at least once. It usually was for 3-4 hours. Sometimes they knew it would go off but mostly it just when out. He lives in District 4.

Thi's mother/brother live in Tan Binh district. The power and internet there is less stable. Since she's been here, she's been chatting with her family everynight possible. However there has been 1-2 times where the internet (Yahoo really) has been unstable but still able to chat (Yahoo messenger freezes or quits unexpectedly. Restarting Yahoo usually reconnects them) and 1 or 2 times that the power was off or went off while chatting. She chats at 10pm US time usually.

Since I use Macs, we use iVisit to voice chat because Yahoo doesn't support the Mac with voice yet. When I set her up to voice chat, iVisit was the only program I found that supported both Mac and PCs for voice chat. Now Skype, Gizmo and others do but the iVisit/Yahoo combination works (except Yahoo is a little flaky and my expensive audio hardware I use for music doesn't always like being used for chatting and making sounds in Yahoo. We have to flip the sync on it somtimes to reconnect the audio. I don't have that problem with my music software). Changing it now would be a problem as her family don't know English, computers nor have a "computer" friend to help them configure Skype, Gizmo, etc. They know how to start and log on in Yahoo and iVisit. .....

Even when we chatting over the last year and half, there were many times when the internets was unstable, sometimes unusable and of course the power would be off either long enough so we couldn't chat or would cut our chats short. But never has it been more than a day between chats because of power or internet problems.


Peter and Thi

I-129F Sent : 2007-05-26
I-129F NOA1 : 2007-06-11
I-129F RFE(s) :
RFE Reply(s) :
I-129F NOA2 : 2007-10-26
Touched: 2007-11-02
NVC Recieved: 2007-11-16
Consulate recieved ??????
Packet 3 sent 2007-12-11
Packet 3 received 2007-12-24
Packet 3 returned 2007-12-28
Packet 4 sent 2008-1-14
Email Reply with Interview Date 2008-1-23
Interview Date 2008-2-27
Passed Interview 2008-02-27
Visa Pick Up Date 2008-3-05
Received Visa 2008-2-29 (called to pick up earlier)
POE 2008-3-05 Los Angeles
Wedding planned 2008-04-26

Yup, that describes our experience to a "t", right even down to the no-voice-YM-with-a-Mac. We use Skype. Oh yeah, we have 1 extra ace in the hole. Mai's nephew, Quang, is a sophomore at University. He is studying computer science. So there is always someone there to patch together all the old, slow, piece-of-junk computers they all have. Thank goodness for that!

My wife lives in My Tho. We haven't experienced any problems these past few weeks.

My sister lives in Cao Lanh and the internet is generally horrible there, while my parents live in Saigon and we rarely have any problem talking on Skype.