autonomous_unit

NAT is Network Address Translation. This is why they say you have a "private address".

The problem is that you do not have a normal public address to which the UDP traffic can be sent from the other end of the VOIP phone connection. An earlier post was suggesting that you could solve this by adjusting the router in your house, but the information from TT&T is stating that it is CAT and not your own router that is doing this translation from some CAT address to the private address your modem sees. You would be able to solve the problem if your modem had a public address but your own equipment was performing NAT (as many home routers do).

Think of the address as a street address and the port number is a room number. However, because of address translation, nobody outside CAT knows what your street address is. When you send normal TCP traffic, like with your web browser asking for a webpage, there is a return address consisting of your street address and the room number where you'll be waiting for a reply. When CAT handles your letter, they rip off this return address and put a different one on that gives one of CAT's street addresses and some unique "room number" where they want the reply sent. In that room, some guy knows that when a reply gets there he is to forward it on to your address and room inside the realm of CAT.

The problem is that the internet phone uses UDP rather than TCP. This is like sending a bunch of postcards with snippets of conversation instead of a big envelope full of letters. The phone system in the US wants to send postcards to a special room in your house (the phonebooth?) where these postcards will be understood. However, no postman knows how to get these cards to your building. Even worse, if someone tries to forward them to a phonebooth at CAT, there are none that are smart enough to send it on to your phonebooth!

Given that the TT&T representative is suggesting you go elsewhere, that is probably what you need to do to make this work. Changes would have to be made at CAT to provide some address that would always forward the SIP data to your own equipment.

You mean NAT address, correct ? It's easy, just open the ports and setup your router for port forwarding.

Port forwarding does not work when it is the ISP who is applying NAT to your traffic. Unfortunately, some ISPs have the mistaken idea that the Internet is nothing more than a service for your web browser.

There are some standards for "NAT traversal" in order to get traffic such as VPNs and real-time data (including IP phones) to pass through NATs, but you can rarely determine whether it will work in your case without experimentation or very knowledgeable support staff in the network(s) applying the NAT.

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I'd be interested in some factual information about what LEGAL benefits (including residency) there are for farang men who marry Thai ladies. What adventages are there to marrying compared to co-habiting?

Well, in many parts of the world the legal "risks" talked about on this thread become real whether you marry or simply cohabitate for a long time. I'm not sure how many people realize that...

To answer your specific question, I think the big items for men in most places are similar to what were described for the women, eg taxes, pensions, inheritence, insurance, and rights regarding children. Even if there are practical asymmetries in the way these benefits are delivered between the sexes, it is still better than you get with cohabitation. For cross-national marriages there are also shortcuts in the visa and citizenship processes for spouses and children which may be useful.

But for us, the motivation was largely family and social comfort at "making it official" after years of people assuming it would happen. A minor benefit was the symbolic aspect of confirming and proclaiming our intentions to each other; we both found it oddly reassuring despite our knowing what we wanted all along.

Now if only we would finish the job and get our marriage certificate translated into Thai...

Many on this thread seem fixated on the trees rather than considering the forest.

The point I tried to make last night, echoing an earlier statement that the troubles in Thailand are as much "modernization" as "westernization", is that negative issues like obesity and wasteful consumption are intricately linked with positive effects of modern life. Particularly, they are evidence of "upward mobility" as people who had not are suddenly having! The same things happened in the U.S. and western Europe after WWII as a middle-class expanded with little idea of how to live with these new benefits.

My observation: A person who grows up and learns living skills in an environment of scarcity will often tend towards gluttony and even hoarding when presented with an abundance. It takes significant psychological adjustment to change your life strategies to best cope with the new environment. Some people adapt readily and some never seem to. This sort of change can cause great generational disconnect in a family when the changes occur in only a matter of years or a decade.

I could go on with my opinions on how or why this seems to occur, but I would rather just assume it is the case for the purpose of this discussion. You can observe this with staples (rice, soap, basic clothing) as well as with "global" branded products, so I also do not entirely buy the suggestion that mass marketing is to blame. I think people would just find something else to over-consume if brands were to disappear overnight.

My question: Are people concerned about these effects suggesting that society in Thailand (and elsewhere in developing or developed countries) would be better off scrapping the modern economy and reverting to a situation of relative scarcity? Do the negative effects outweigh the positive benefits for quality of life, healthcare, etc. (bearing in mind that much of the current acceleration in science, medicine and technology is afforded by this efficient global economy)?

Assuming most people would answer "no", I think the real question we face is how to help ourselves adjust to this modernization. How do we teach each other to live lives of healthful moderation through choice and action when most of us are not quite sure how to do it ourselves?

It would be interesting to see this topic with more Thai viewpoints. I feel that many of the westerners are romanticising the Thailand of yore. The westerners likely to be in this forum might even be a self-selected bunch of romantics?

When we were looking at old pictures of my father-in-law in front of his farm, my wife explained that he was so skinny because he was just starting on his land. He hardly ate because the children needed to eat what food there was. I can hardly celebrate the slender shape of people who are starving, while I can worry about the health of everyone who is learning to live with (relative) abundance. Should not the progressive goal be people living healthy lifestyles by choice rather than economic necessity?

Red lorry, yellow lorry... red lorry, yellow lorry...

A lot depends on the speaker. My wife studied in the states for 12 years but struggles with my version of the drill: I'm really leery of riding in furious Larry's hot-rod lorry. She hears and knows the difference but gets tripped up in the delivery. She grew up in the South though and speaks central Thai very rapidly. Not all people really know how they speak, or rather how to consciously produce sounds and phonemes instead of whole words.