Village House - NO INTERNET

[cathy789]

We use CLP..and we have tried other companies but none has coverage. Seems that Pccw is the only company allowed to supply in villages

[Ofnpanad]

Hi Cathy,

Yes you're correct that in 90% of village houses it's PCCW 8MB broadband or nothing. When I lived in Sha Tin Wai village PCCW did actually mention that as there was a housing estate nearby with fibre to the home service, they would extend this into the village for $22,000. They left it up to me to either pay myself or try to club together with the village leader and villagers.

I did make a few tentative enquiries and was told in no uncertain terms that 8MB was more than fast enough for the normal occupants of village houses and it's likely that even if I offered to pay for the upgrade myself it wouldn't happen as:

a) $22,000 is not the true cost as they actually factor in recouping some cost to people signing up for the new fibre service.
b) The villagers would make it clear to PCCW that nobody wanted it apart from me and they wouldn't give permission for the necessary digging up of the paths through the village anyway.

Your 4G solution is going to give you the best internet you can achieve but get very expensive. I recommend keeping the 4G service to your phones and taking out 2 unlimited 3G contracts and using them in the Mi-Fi devices. 3G is good enough for most activities as long as the signal is strong in your area.

Strictly speaking "tethering" like this tends not to be allowed on unlimited plans, but I am not sure how this is checked/punished and those contracts are only monthly (~$88) anyway in a worst case scenario.

As you have zero internet access at the moment, another thing you could try is knocking on your neigbours' doors with a local in tow and asking if they would allow you to share their internet if you paid half of the fee.

Hope that helps!

[wtbhotia]

Is there anyway a community can gather together to get broadband installed, or offer to pay the costs to upgrade the main line?.

Some Expat guy living in Clear Water bay knew someone high up in PCCW so he got talking to him about upgrades and after a what probably was a year in back and forth talking PCCW came up with a plan something along the lines of need minimum i think it was 30-40 houses to sign up for the upgrade, extra 30-40$ a month fee, pay a one time upgrade fee of 600$ blah blah and this expat guy go onto face book in one of our community groups and put up a message, immediately he got many responses, it took a while but now their village has 100M line in clear water bay.

From his hard work, PCCW upgraded the line in our village as well but as my house is the furthest from the communication box, i can only upgrade to 30M line, I did speed tests and I can get 28M download / 9-10M Upload speed, such a big difference from previous 6M line LOL

[bossanova0730]

Well, there is not much you can do if you live in a village house if there is no HKBN available.