Prasert

All gold and platinum channels are now broadcasted in mpeg4 with NDS encryption. Older SD boxes are now only showing the knowledge package which is still broadcasted in mpeg2.

I have seen the brand Ainol in Pantip but since those tablets are without gps or 3g I didn't really look at it.

ZTE: the model at Tesco was V9+. Runs v2.3. ZTE plans to put more equipment on the Thai market in Q3 of this year.

Budget - I guess I'll be looking at the price range 8k-11k. Huawei Mediapad was 9900 at Tesco in May (but no longer available). Samsung Tab 2 is 12600 so anything more expensive must be better quality.

I'll be using the tablet for application testing, so Android v3.2 would be good to test compatibility. The app I'm working on relies on location services, so GPS is a requirement. 3G-sticks don't provide location services, so built-in 3G would be nice.

I thought it was funny, as there's no way to get a GPS signal inside a building and I was pretty sure the tablet didn't have a GPS option.

Obviously nobody told Samsung Tab that as have no problem getting GPS location inside home.

Are you sure you get a GPS signal? Cell towers provide location services too, but slightly less accurate.I'm pretty sure a GPS signal will not reach the 4th floor in MBK....

Last week I had a look for a new android tablet in both MBK and Pantip. Two simple requirements:

- built-in GPS

- 7"

and if possible

- Honeycomb or ICS

- built-in 3G

It turns out that most sales people have no idea about what they're selling. One seller was waiting 20 minutes for a GPS fix inside MBK. I thought it was funny, as there's no way to get a GPS signal inside a building and I was pretty sure the tablet didn't have a GPS option.

In the end, the only option turned out to be Samsung. No tablets from ZTE or Huawei.

So where do I go for a better choice of tablets?

RMaps is a mapping application that uses other maps next to Google Maps, e.g. OpenStreetMap. It caches the visited map-parts on the SDcard. It can also handle offline maps - which you can create on your pc using Mobile Atlas Creator.

OpenStreetMap seems to be more accurate than Google Maps.

Any of these models have GPS?

All mobile phone GPS applications show you a solid blue screen when you're at sea. Since there's no nautical map app available for Thailand, I decided to have a go at creating my own phone app.

Basic idea: have the app function the same way as google maps, but offline (mobile data connections are pretty useless at sea) and showing the depths and nearby dive locations.

Sofar so good. Now it comes down to getting the actual nautical charts. I managed to get my hands on a few Thai nautical charts, like this one from the similans, chart T307b:

Does anyone know where I can get these maps? Preferably digital....

I installed this gasheater on the back of my house 4 years ago. It's from HomePro and now priced at 5900 baht.

The hot water pipes are 1/2" copper (pvc will not do well in the long run).

Water temperature can be set by using 1, 2 or 3 burners (middle knob). Minor regulation can be done with the knob for the flame height.

It can easily run 2 showers: just turn up the water temperature, so each shower only needs a bit of hot water to mix with cold water.

Gas consumption: 16.5kg (average size gastank) per 9 months. That's with 2 people each taking 2 showers a day for about 5 minutes.

I enabled IPv6 on my network quite some time ago through a tunnel. Today, there's a substantial increase ip IPv6 traffic:

In Thailand, only NECTEC has put efforts into IPv6. According to NECTEC, IPv6 should be available for customers from CAT and TOT who specifically ask for it, but even their local engineers have no clue at all what IPv6 is: I don't know and cannot are their answers.

Worldwide, lots of services have been available over IPv6. Google and Facebook are examples of websites everybody knows. But there's a lot more. Most European and American based websites are IPv6 ready. In Asia, China and Korea are using IPv6. Practically all datacenters in Singapore are IPv6 ready.

By the way, ThaiVisa is not part of the next generation yet. No IPv6 to this website.

The biggest problem for Thailand is probably that currently IPv6 bypasses all their censorship attempts. Even when tunneling IPv6 through NECTEC, a Thai tunnelbroker.

Thailand still has a lot of steps to take into this new technology future.....

You can always make your own cheap nas using FreeNAS on a usb stick, Intel D510 mini-itx mainboard and a small ITX case that can support 2 or more sata drives. This will allow you more flexibility than anything else.

My advice as well.

The mainboard is around 2400 baht. Mini-ATX case including power supply: 800 baht. Add memory (max 2x 2GB) and (a maximum of 2) SATA disks, install linux and you've got a machine that does anything you configure it to do.

It's silent and uses a minimum of power.

The successor of this board, the D525, doesn't run smooth without a monitor attached: it won't do warm reboots. So if you plan to use it as a headless server, go for the D510.

(if the problem mentioned above is fixed now, please do correct me)

Check what goes down during a power cut, the dsl circuit or the ppp connection. If the DSL connection goes down you lose the entire connection of course, and a DSLAM module usually takes about 3 minutes to start up again.

Best place to check if the local loop is on power backup, is your local CAT office, as it is their responsibility. The call-center doesn't have this information. Afaik, CAT doesn't use UPSes but separate chargers/inverters with batteries attached (which lasts way longer than a household UPS).

If it's just the PPP connection, the problem can be anywhere, as there's at least 3 devices between your router and the one that hands out your IP address.

cmon! downloading TORRENTS in your HOTEL!!

And crying about it no less.

Get a life

Actually I was thinking the same. If I check into a hotel and want to check my mail, check a few websites and do some work over a VPN connection, it would be very nice if a single person is not taking all the bandwidth that is to be shared with all other guests in the hotel.

How likely is it that a newbie will build a linux server?

I think that the majority here will use linux with a mouse. Running linux as a server in initlevel 3 and using only the commandline, is not really a newbie thing...

You can check how the computer uses multiple network interfaces by looking at the routing table. At the command line, type netstat -r:

IPv4 Route Table
===========================================================================
Active Routes:
Network Destination        Netmask          Gateway       Interface  Metric
         0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      172.25.14.1     172.25.14.10     25

0.0.0.0 is the default route.

When you connect a 2nd interface which has a default route as well, the computer will choose the one with the lowest metric. Windows automatically assigns a lower metric value to a faster interface.

So if you want to have double bandwidth by connecting 2 networkcards to the same network, you have to team them first. The software to do this is usually provided by the manufacturer and provides a single teamed-interface to the operating system, on which 1 IP address will be configured.

If you connect your PC to 2 different networks, the routing table will decide which connection is used.

it's back

...

In fact, IPv6 is already running on quite a large part of the internet, although Asia is not included in that part.

I will take this back, as Asian ISPs are catching up fast.

Looking into IPv6, I found Hurricane Electric and they provide IPv6 connectivity through www.tunnelbroker.net

I signed up for a free account, created a tunnel through the web interface to Singapore and applied for a free /48 subnet.

Configuring IPv6 on the network seems like a difficult task but it turned out to be much easier than IPv4!

An IPv6 address looks like this: 2001:4701:ab86:1000:da5d:4cff:fe82:91e0

When broken up into pieces it becomes more clear how the address is built up:

2001:4701:ab86:1000:da5d:4cff:fe82:91e0

2001:4701:ab86 is the subnet assigned by the ISP (/48)

:1000:da is for local subnets, and yours to assign!

5d:4cff:fe82:91e0 is automatically derived from the mac address of your network adapter (in this case the mac address is D8:5D:4C:82:91:E0)

The nice part of IPv6 is that once it is configured on the router, all hosts on the connected network will automatically configure themselves. Dhcp is no longer required, and with virtually unlimited IP addresses for local use, NAT is no longer required. So nomore portforwarding headaches to get your torrents going!

Quite a large amount of websites are accessible over IPv6. An example of a traceroute (with nnnn disguising my address):

Tracing the route to eztv.it (2A00:1A28:1151:4::98:443)

1 2001:470:nnnn:1200::1 52 msec 36 msec 36 msec

2 2001:470:nnnn:5:20D:BCFF:FEBB:7AA0 68 msec 36 msec 36 msec

3 2001:470:nnnn:32::1 340 msec 300 msec 316 msec

4 gige-g2-13.core1.sin1.he.net (2001:470:0:17C::1) 328 msec 356 msec 304 msec

5 gige-g3-12.core1.hkg1.he.net (2001:470:0:177::1) 360 msec 412 msec 392 msec

6 gige-g3-7.core1.lax1.he.net (2001:470:0:16B::1) 580 msec * 508 msec

7 10gigabitethernet4-3.core1.nyc4.he.net (2001:470:0:10E::2) 608 msec 572 msec 596 msec

8 10gigabitethernet3-3.core1.lon1.he.net (2001:470:0:128::2) 668 msec 636 msec 676 msec

9 2001:7F8:4::A6D4:1 672 msec 640 msec 672 msec

10 te-2-1.sto3.se.portlane.net (2A00:1A28:1:2003::1) 720 msec 800 msec 664 msec

11 te-3-2.sto1.se.portlane.net (2A00:1A28:1:2001::2) 664 msec 708 msec 692 msec

12 te-3-4-234-dcp-demarc.sto1.se.portlane.net (2A00:1A28:1:4003::2) 716 msec 672 msec *

13 2A00:1A28:1151:1336:2::2 668 msec 692 msec *

14 eztv.it (2A00:1A28:1151:4::98:443) 720 msec 704 msec 664 msec

Despite the latency caused by the tunnel connection, it's fun to see how utorrent easily connects to other IPv6 hosts and starts to download (the newest linux release) fast!

Google has moved onto IPv6 (http://ipv6.google.com/)

How long will it take for thaivisa.com to move onto IPv6?

And how long will it take for Thailand to come up with IPv6, as this new technology happens to bypass any government blocks........

How many times before did we see this news? We've been running out of IP addresses for years now.

But the real problem is that there are enough IP addresses, but people don't know how to manage these ranges. Start with the end-user, who in general has this attitude:

I want to use the internet, but

-I don't wanna know how a computer works, and I don't wanna learn

-I don't know how the internet works, and I couldn't care less

-I don't want to pay for it, in fact internet should be for free!

Next are the ISPs, where employees are trying to cope with a lack of knowledge that is hardly smaller compared to the average enduser.

As Phazey mentioned, the OSI model is the primary building block of the internet and all computers and applications running on it. Unfortunately, hardly any engineer or software programmer can explain it in 7 sentences.

The equipment used on the backbones (Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, Foundry etc) has been capable of handling IPv6 for many years now. The same goes for the management software as 99% is unix-based. Unix and it's primary network applications have been able to handle IPv6 for many years. In fact, IPv6 is already running on quite a large part of the internet, although Asia is not included in that part.

The only missing part is knowledge.

Pantip 3rd floor

800 Baht

Make sure you get a US-international keyboard layout, as most shops sell 701 keyboard with a different layout (don't know which layout it is. Characters are qwerty, but special characters like : ; " ' are in a different location)

Not quite sure what you mean by "measured on the DSLAM."

Exactly as it says: I query the DSLAM for specific port values.

Of course that's not allowed by subscribers, but since I work with DSLAMs on a daily base, I can check both sides.

user crit kernel: ADSL G.994 training - handshake procedure

user crit kernel: ADSL G.992 started - line established

user crit kernel: ADSL G.992 channel analysis

Unfortunately, the number is incomplete in your log.

G.992.1 = G.DMT

G.992.3 = ADSL2

G.992.5 = ADSL2+

Looking at the current SNR values, I assume it's G.DMT, and also since the router says it can do 8M/1M, the maximum possible with old-school ADSL (and this maybe makes lomatopo reconsider his incorrect remark).

In that case, the current SNR values are good.

And besides this discussion:

You are not paying for and entitled to 5M down and 512k up.

You may use 5M/512k of bandwidth shared with n other users. The value for n is the contention ratio.

TOT issued Billion 5210S RC modem

ZyXel 660R-T1 modem

Other than getting different SNR and Attenuation readings which are about 5db different between the two modems and different setup menus, both modems work equally well on my TOT line/package. The ZyXel modem gives me about a 5db lower SNR reading and also an attenuation reading that is about 5 db lower. This 5 db difference in readings stays the same whether switching the modems out every 10 minutes or so.....or running each modem for several days to months.

The values I posted earlier are measured on the DSLAM.

I compared these with a Cisco router and a Zyxel router; both the router and the DSLAM give me the same SNR value.

However, the exact value is not important.

The change in values over time is important!

Thanks for this thorough response. I'm trying to follow best I can! When you say "Turn on the logging in your router and check the messages during the time problems occur. It will probably be an addition to the list of SNR values and show that the router is not the problem..." can you be specific what you mean?

The moment the line goes bad and disconnects, you will probably see lots of messages about the ATM circuit (=phone line connection) or PADI requests being sent. The easiest option is to copy them, post 'm here and I'll explain them.

Attainable Rate (Kbps): 8608 1184

Rate (Kbps): 5120 640

This looks like the router is capable of 8M/1M but is now connected at 5M/640k

What is the speed on your contract? Because with the current SNR values the router should be able to connect at 8M/1M (if the DSLAM offers that speed!)

And do you see any information on the modulation type? E.g. G.DMT / ADSL2 / ADSL2+

Tajartale, you're on the right way in diagnosing the actual problem: SNR values

I checked some values on an 8M down 1M up ADSL line (G.DMT so the old ADSL v1).

The above graph shows downstream SNR in green and upstream in blue. Length of this line is about 2km untwisted copper.

(the 2 outages you see is a switched off router during lightning in the area).

The steep drops you see are completely consistent with the monsoon rains falling down at those times. However, the internet connection remains stable.

To convince TOT the problem started since they changed the wiring, you should start gathering data from your router. Either write down the SNR values manually over a longer period, or have your computer do it (the software I use is MRTG and it works by sending SNMP requests to the router, asking for SNR values. Don't know if your router supports this).

When you have more information over a longer period of time, you will most likely see a relation between the graph and the weather, and it will correspond with the static you hear on the line.

As for the change in SNR values after resetting the router (or just the adsl interface):

When the interface switches on, it starts to train the line, which means that every frequency block (called bins) is tested by the router and the DSLAM. The connection speed depends on the quality of these blocks. If enough blocks are available for the full 8M/1M connection, the DSLAM and router will negotiate this speed.

When the signal degrades over time, the DSLAM sees a decrease in SNR. If the decrease is larger than the threshold value (usually 3dB), the DSLAM will disconnect and starts training the line again.

As for the Dlink router:

I have tested numerous adsl routers over the last 3 years. The shittiest are the ones that TOT used to provide with their lines.

Turn on the logging in your router and check the messages during the time problems occur. It will probably be an addition to the list of SNR values and show that the router is not the problem.

So start collecting SNR data from your router, either manually or by a script. Multiple values measured over a period of time are very useful, contrary to one-time measurements like a speedtest.

Once you have that information, you can show the TOT employee why he doesn't see a problem at the specific moment he's checking your line. (Don't call it an engineer, as this title implies creativity and logical thinking while using your brain. Those requirements are not in their job description)

Important to keep in mind:

All of the above is only about the connection between your router and the DSLAM, and has nothing to do with internet speeds! But it is the first basic requirement for a stable internet connection.

...

What a waste of time and Bandwidth – and I am absolutely sure it angers more people than it attracts.

...

Ever noticed how fast this website loads when you block 3rd party links?

Anyone here on Thai Visa that know how to make money with an Internet business. I've been trying 3 years without success.

You're looking at an internet business: this very website.

Take a look at the whole page and take a look at the source.

It's covered in advertisements. Click on one and some money goes into Thaivisa's pocket.

While you load a single page from this website, the following websites are visited repeatedly for ads:

pagead2.googlesyndication.com/

pubads.g.doubleclick.net

Next, you gather as much information as you can from visitors, this site does that with

hits.truehits.in.th/data/f0009453.js

hits.truehits.in.th

www.google-analytics.com/ga.js

www3.effectivemeasure.net/v3/em_js

widgets.amung.us/a_pro.js

With that information, you can increase your revenue from advertisements.

Next thing to do (I admit that's the hardest part): get loads of visitors on your website and wait for them to click on advertisements.

And, not the least important: secure your income, make sure nothing happens that might jeopardize your revenue.