Spent 4 hours trying to video call from a coffee shop in Chiang Mai and it just kept dropping

I was in Chiang Mai last week and needed to hop on a client call that was pretty important. Found a coffee shop with what looked like solid wifi, but the video kept freezing every 2 minutes. I spent a full 4 hours bouncing between 3 different cafes before someone told me to just use my phone hotspot instead. Turns out a lot of places here throttle video traffic during peak hours. Has anyone else run into this issue in SEA?

2 comments

2 Comments

hannah_price7925d ago

Oh man, the "bouncing between cafes" part hit so hard. I spent a whole afternoon in Bangkok doing the exact same thing for a job interview. Every place I tried had that problem where the video would be fine for like 30 seconds then just freeze up with that spinning circle. It was so frustrating because the wifi signal looked great but something was clearly blocking the video. My friend who lives there finally told me the same thing about throttling during busy times, especially in touristy spots. I ended up just finding a quiet corner in a mall and using my data, which worked way better than any coffee shop wifi ever did. It's wild how you can have full bars of wifi but video calls just won't cooperate over there.

jason7325d agoMost Upvoted

The "quiet corner in a mall" thing is exactly what my buddy figured out the hard way. He was in Ho Chi Minh trying to close a deal on Zoom and spent like 2 hours in a coffee shop watching the loading spinner. Finally some local dude saw him frustrated and told him to go to the electronics section of a big mall and use their display phones as a hotspot. Sounds crazy but it actually worked for him because the stores have dedicated business lines that don't get throttled. He said the mall staff didn't even care as long as he bought a bottle of water from the vending machine. Now he swears by malls over coffee shops for any important call over there.