# Which cities for high speed Internet in Mexico?



## LiamHidalgo (Oct 21, 2016)

Hi, I'll be moving to Mexico and working remotely. I've haven't decided where yet, but know I'll need high speed Internet: at least 5 Mmbs down and 1.5 Mbps up. What cities have this? I know Mexico City and Guadalajara are options (according to the PC Magazine article "Fastest ISPs 2015: Mexico".) Are there others?


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## RVGRINGO (May 16, 2007)

There is a very important word to know: “Hasta“.


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## Gatos (Aug 16, 2016)

LiamHidalgo said:


> Hi, I'll be moving to Mexico and working remotely. I've haven't decided where yet, but know I'll need high speed Internet: at least 5 Mmbs down and 1.5 Mbps up. What cities have this? I know Mexico City and Guadalajara are options (according to the PC Magazine article "Fastest ISPs 2015: Mexico".) Are there others?


I think you need to change your logic. First find some places you are interested in and THEN determine internet access capability. We happen to live in a city where you can have fiber optic cables or plain old vdsl access depending on where you live. Also - do you plan on using a VPN to perform your work ? That will eat into your throughput as well. The quality of your router and network adapters might influence your performance.


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## joaquinx (Jul 3, 2010)

Most cities meet your criteria. Here in Xapala, I have 20/5.


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## LiamHidalgo (Oct 21, 2016)

@joaquinx: Good to know, thanks. Xalapa wasn't on my radar, but now is. It looks like a nice place. I've been using the Moon Handbook "Living Abroad in Mexico".

@Gatos: The 5/1.5 numbers come from my IT department at work, and assume a VPN.

@RVGRINGO: Hasta que?


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## Gatos (Aug 16, 2016)

We pay Telmex for 100mbps but currently get 20mbps/5mbps . Just as importantly you need to look at SNR - the quality of the line - You could have a great data rate but if you have a poor SNR your connections will drop. We run a VPN on the router. My laptop gets 5/1. It may be time to upgrade the router or get some 5ghz adapters. 

We have a friend in our community who is closer to the main street. She gets 100mbps from Telmex. A few years ago we rented a house which had fiber optic cable and we got Gbps. Same 'town' but perhaps a 20 minute drive between the houses.

Perhaps you know this already - but when you work from home over a VPN you may have to change some habits - perhaps not if you are designing websites - but if you have to work with large datasets, you can't pull that data into your house, you have to push the work back into the office.


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## TundraGreen (Jul 15, 2010)

LiamHidalgo said:


> …@RVGRINGO: Hasta que?


I think RV meant: You get the advertised speeds until you don't. Take all promises with a grain of salt. When I started with Megacable I was promised 5 Mbps, then the upped the advertised speed to 10 Mbps, now it is 20 Mbps. Over this same time period my actual speed has varied from 2 Mbps to about 25 Mbps, with little relation to the advertised speed. Currently, I usually get about 5 Mbps, but for a week or two it was dropping to 200 Kps in the evenings for a few hours.


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## joaquinx (Jul 3, 2010)

I feel that it is more of a statistical item. Since there are many users on the cable running to your computer, the higher your cap the sooner you get a slice of the data either up or down. In the early hours with very few on the line you have a good chance of getting the speed that you paid for. But during the day with businesses on the line and people just surfing performance will degrade. If everyone on the line decided to order the max connection speed, you back to square one and hope that the isp will opt for higher speed cabling and more lines.


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## Gatos (Aug 16, 2016)

We have been in this house about 3 years and have had at least 10 service calls with Telmex. We are on a first name basis with some of the techs. They have been very creative in pointing blame for our problems; here, you need a new modem; you need to ask the office to run new cable from the main junction box (about a mile away); the copper wire in your house needs to be replaced; I've put you on your own exclusive line; and on and on. Usually whatever changes they have made seem to make a difference for a day or so.

About a month or so back I was really fed up. Telmex sent out one of their most senior techs - everyone knows this guy. His conclusion - replace copper wire in the house (which would have not been trivial as it is under the house). I talked him into running new wire from the curb streetside, up over the stand-alone garage, up on the roof perhaps 100-150 feet directly to the modem/router. It was an experiment. If we had no problems with this new wire then I would have to agree that our copper wire was bad. Well a day or so later we started having the same issues as before. I started printing off the DSL status page of the router - which showed that when we had problems the SNR margin value had dropped into the 7's (which is terrible). Telmex sent three techs out as a team. One guy really understood the cable and the gizmo they used to test the line; one guy really understood the router and what it was reporting; and another senior guy. The saw the problem I was reporting with the new wire. They disconnected the new wire and they saw the same problems with the old wire.

One clue to our problem was that when I am streaming something to the roku AND my wife was on her fijo often times we would lose our internet and she would have terrible noise on her phone - once even when she was on the phone with the Telmex office. So this team of three ran new wire (along the floor) to the phone in my wife's office. There was still noise on the line. There was a micro-filter near the router but only the router was using it. The landline was not. So they first replaced the two jacks with new ones and then re-wired my wife's existing phone line to go through the micro filter. All our issues immediately disappeared.

Everyone went home with a fresh jar of home made jam and a bag of oranges...

For the last few weeks our data rate has been 21199 Kbps and never deviates. The SNR margin is 17.4 dB as I write this. That value has been as high as 18 something. For completeness - the data rate IS a factor in the SNR margin calculation.


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## Gatos (Aug 16, 2016)

@eastwind

So are you happy with your netgear nighthawk ac1900 ? It is VDSL ? Does it out of the box provide VPN Client support (no need to burn it) ? 

At the moment I have two cascaded routers. The one from Telmex which for all intents and purposes could be in bridge mode, and my Cisco E4500 Tomato burnt router. I checked and their is very very little impact on my network if the Cisco router is not accessing the VPN. Otherwise I seem to be losing as much as 75%. So - being the networking novice that I am - I figure the Cisco router doesn't have enough Umphh to handle the VPN translations.

Do you know - all of the current devices in the house will still be able to access the netgear router without issue ?


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## jackBnimble (Oct 18, 2016)

Hi - I travel all over the Republic but live in Mazatlán - nearly any medium to large metro will meet your fairly basic needs - you should generally expect much faster service than your requirements - also its not really dependent on the city but your location IN that city - try to locate yourself where there is fiber-optic service for stability and reliability and most places will have it in SOME neighborhoods, but not in all. Also because its your business/work and its not that expensive - consider some redundancy - eg: I use MegaCable - fair reliability 20 MBPS down 7 up - AND TelMex Fiber Optic 10MBPS down and 5 Up - cost combined for both is about 1000 MN monthly (also DONT believe what they tell you at TelMex Office - yes you certainly CAN get internet without phone service if you don't want a useless Telmex phone connection -go to their website and print out their advertised pkg internet only & carry with you) and with redundancy seems like one will always be available - I use VPN - generally off the fiber optic and on a third router (Netgear -Tomato Config) so anything I want over that can be put behind the VPN inc WiFi connections - VPN we get 7 down and about 1.5 to 3 back up on a Miami server


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## eastwind (Jun 18, 2016)

Although I'm an internet junkie that gets withdrawal whenever I get knocked offline, I wouldn't put blazing speed as a requirement. I get 11 down 1 up from my laptop (over wifi) and I could live with that even if I was working (though I'm retired now).

Before I retired, though, it was common where I worked to work from home. We didn't even try to download work to our home computers though, we just did remote login to the machines at work, so the connection speed didn't matter that much. We were just writing code, though. If you are doing 3d animation or visualization or something else graphics intensive then I can see needing to avoid pushing a lot of rendered graphics frames over the connection, and so therefore needing to download a lot of the raw data in order to work with it locally. Still, even with a slow connection you might just have to adjust your work habits to plan ahead and do big downloads at night.

What I would personally put higher up the list of givens and druthers would be ease of travel (how close you are to an airport and where you can fly direct to from that airport) and, unless you're just going to do 120 day tourist visas forever, how convenient it is to get to an INM office (see my thread "getting an RT" for the backstory there).

And hopefully you won't spend all your time working, so you might want to consider what sort of play-time opportunities there are in a prospective location. 

There's more to quality of life than your max download speed!


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

eastwind said:


> . . . unless you're just going to do 120 day tourist visas forever . . .


That should be *180* "day tourist visas".


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## perropedorro (Mar 19, 2016)

Always remember that if you're coming from the U.S., you'll be getting more and/or paying less for internet almost anywhere else you go. We've got the greediest ISPs in the world. Outside the big cities in Mexico, Telmex Infinitum is probably the only game in town, but I've found it as fast and reliable as what I was paying 3X for in L.A.


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## TundraGreen (Jul 15, 2010)

Isla Verde said:


> That should be *180* "day tourist visas".


Actually it should be "180 day tourist *permits*". They are not visas


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## UKMX (Jul 28, 2016)

TundraGreen said:


> Actually it should be "180 day tourist *permits*". They are not visas


Actually it should be "180 day *pedant* permits"


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

UKMX said:


> Actually it should be "180 day *pedant* permits"


Is it being a pedant to provide the correct term? I don't think so!


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## angelica_00 (Oct 31, 2016)

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but what is the deal on using a VPN? I'll be working remotely and paid through PayPal. I recently heard of someone who had been here for years having PayPal suddenly freeze their account for 6 months because her IP is in MX and she has a U.S. PP account.

If anyone is being paid through PP for remote work, can you please tell me what kind of setup I would need? I suppose a VPN would keep PP from knowing where I am, but does it stop them from limiting your account? 

I intend to get a Temporary Resident visa and a Mexican bank account, but not immediately. I want to stay awhile and see if I like it first. 

I don't make a lot of money, so not having access to it would be disastrous to me.


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## sillyrabbit (Nov 16, 2016)

Hi, how is high speed internet (availability/speed/cost) in PV?


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

lmontgom said:


> Sure; I put joaquinx (a member name) in the message, but looks like it went to the thread. I'd love to have a new Xalapa thread!
> 
> I sent a request that joaquinx be a 'contact,' then wrote to him. How does a member write directly to another member?


If you want to respond directly to a member's post on the open forum, click the Reply With Quote icon before writing your post. You can write directly to another member using the PM function. This won't be available to you till you've made 5 posts.

I will start a new Xalapa thread for you in a few minutes.

And welcome to the forum!


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## lmontgom (Nov 16, 2016)

Isla Verde said:


> Who is your comment directed to? Would you like me to start a new thread for you about moving to Xalapa?





Isla Verde said:


> If you want to respond directly to a member's post on the open forum, click the Reply With Quote icon before writing your post. You can write directly to another member using the PM function. This won't be available to you till you've made 5 posts.
> 
> I will start a new Xalapa thread for you in a few minutes.
> 
> And welcome to the forum!


Thanks, Isla. Joaquinx also replied. I like this forum. So I'll hurry up and make 5 posts...then I will have PM.


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## Isla Verde (Oct 19, 2011)

lmontgom said:


> Thanks, Isla. Joaquinx also replied. I like this forum. So I'll hurry up and make 5 posts...then I will have PM.


We're glad we've made a good impression on you.


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