Lannig

Problems both ways due to this severed submarine cable, folks.

I'm currently in my home country (France) and e-banking to my Thai bank (Kasikorn) is barely feasible these days.

DTAC's web site is agonisingly slow from here as well.

Has anyone ever actually seen good prices for electronics in an airport's duty free shop recently?

I haven't in so many years. I mean, even in places with a good reputation like e.g. Dubai every phone, tablet I've checked I can get for significantly cheaper over regular internet shops here in France, with full local warranty. I'm not even speaking of the Chinese boutiques.

Back to the original topic: yes, the prices for food at Suwa are outrageous. And the folks at the Burger King (is it really a BK? I have a doubt) are not even nice or efficient. How many times have I been told "no have" while asking for some incredibly overpriced combination menu?

I've seen fast food chains displaying (almost) normal prices in many european and middle-eastern airports.

As others wrote: in all the chains you can end up with 0.25, 0.50, 0.75.

At 7/11, Tesco, Makro, BigC....

Yes it's a "chain", supermarket thing.

Same as in the west, often for those seemingly cheap prices.

Some Euro countries have abolished the 1 and 2 cent coins.

In Germany it's still a holy cow and you will hardly find a price of 2 Euro, 1.99 of course

Same here in France with these pesky .99 prices.

But no one uses cash in supermarkets anymore.

I do agree that at when I'm in Thailand, at my local 7/11 they're more than happy to let me spend some time digging out a dozen of so of these small coins to make for the exact change. They seem to actually like getting them.

Oh yes Thai people do treat stray dogs nicely... by forcing them to "wear" old t-shirts around their body during the so-called "cold" season.

Very common sight and always the source of a good laugh for me.

Wow, I'm impressed that you've actually managed to reach someone who had a clue about this issue so quickly. Congratulations!

A friend of mine who's close to the folks at APNIC told me that the shortage of IPv4 address is not that much of an issue in the Asia-Pacific region yet. They still have many blocks available for allocation and prices haven't gone up like in other regions of the world.

Well, maybe 3BB is just being proactive... or greedy here. Or just addressing (no pun intended) an emergency situation because no one cared to request new blocks of IP and they've run out internally. Sounds more plausible from what I know

Last time I drove to/from Pattaya in January I saw the toll plaza in the final stages of building right next to the intersection that lets you enter the tollway or take the Chonburi bypass for a free ride to BKK. So basically right west of Chonburi.

I never ever use the tollway. I prefer taking another hour or so of my time and drive over freeway #3 through Bang Na. Tollway #7 is ridiculously expensive, boring as hell (I tend to fall asleep easily at the wheel, so it's a real hazard to me) and has only one overcrowded place for a pit stop at the 7/11.

I kind of like driving under the shade of the elevated expressway too. Nicer during the hot season (yes I do have air-con).

I'm pretty sure that most if not all of those who have become jobless during the past year in my circle of Thai people do not seek compensation from social security system so they don't fall into these figures.

Why? because they're not entitled to (it's my understanding that they apply only if one had a declared job in a registered company) or possibly because they don't know their rights.

So these figures are questionable at best anyway and they don't account for the reality of unemployment in Thailand.

Why would someone in Canada buy a second-hand computer, even high range, from Thailand?

It just doesn't make sense. Not cost-effective with shipping charges, most people in the western world would think high risk too.

When it smells fishy, it is fishy IMO.

On the other hand, it always frustrates me a lot when I go to some Thai restaurant here in Paris and I pay 13 or 15 euros for a dish that's just marginally more copious and with better ingredients than what I can buy I some places I know for 40 bahts while in Thailand (OK, let's say 80 bahts "kap khao" style)

The fancy plates, pristine white tablecloth and wannabe exotic decoration just don't cut the price difference.

Seems that the moral police is fairly awake today on TV. Or just bored?

I don't condone overspeeding at all in general and especially not in Thailand due to the many very, very unpredictable behaviours encountered here, but seriously, did you guys really need to jump over the OP like this? geez... he never said that he was driving that fast anyway. He was trying to be useful and he got slapped all around.

Humm... hope that TOT isn't using carrier NAT yet.

I depend on my home-made PPP-over-SSH VPN when I'm in Thailand to connect to my employer's network when I'm called for support.

The connection is issued from a box at work so I need a reachable public IP address (I use dynamic DNS and port forwarding on the TOT fibre router)

That would pretty much defeat this

Next time in Thailand will be around Sorgn Karn so I'd expect proper support being almost impossible to reach during that period.

Oh... and there is IPv6 in Thailand for sure. At least on the academic networks. However I'm not sure that any of the commercial ISPs has really engaged into this yet.

I stand corrected. Didn't know about these carrier NAT blocks, thanks for enlightening me, Innerspace.

Oh well, I'm more a system than network guy anyway. Always have.

On the other hand I recall while working at a major Thai ISP in the early 2000s seeing real IPs being used where private ones where due. And since 100.x.x.x looks like a nice roundish randomly chosen number, I assumed that it could have been the same.

I can see a major drawback to using such carrier NAT though: doesn't it make completely impossible for a customer to run something visible from the Internet such as a small web server, NAS or whatever?

Thailand - the hub of bus crashes.

(sorry if this has been done before)

What is "tripping out" when you plug in the microwave/toaster? One of the over-voltage breakers (the box on the right of your photo) or the RCD (the box on the left of your photo)? Does it trip instantly or after the while?

That's what I'd have asked too.

However, I suspect that the breakers on the right protect again over-current (i.e. short circuits or something draining too much current for the installation) not over-voltage.

I'll try a wild guess: 3BB is somehow doing another layer of NAT (network address translation) within their own network beyond your router.

So your computer's IP address gets translated two times: once by your router and a second time within 3BB's network before reaching the Internet.

That's a really dirty trick I think they could resort to as en emergency measure because they ran out of IPV4 addresses and they can't be bothered to move to IPV6 yet (not many ISPs do, actually, it's quite a hassle)

If the "real" IP shown by your router actually shows as 100.x.x.x that's even dirtier because this range of addresses isn't supposed to be used for private IP networks. Using them as such (so easy to type, eh?) could effectively cut you off from any entity legitimately using these addresses as real addresses, presumably somewhere in Europe since this block is assigned to EU.

Again, just a wild guess but seems to fit well to me, knowing a bit about the horrors Thai ISPs are capable of (been there, worked in such a company) and due to the current shortage of IPV4 addresses. ISPs are finding it harder and harder to get new blocks assigned to them when their networks grow.

Should have told them it fell out of your passport.

It's no big deal they just give you another

They used to staple it inside your passport. Last time I went through immigration at Swampy they didn't even care doing so. I almost lost it, had to ask a clerk at my bank to staple it for me when I went to exchange some euros.

I kind of collect these cheap chinese tablets (both Android and Windows-based but I'll assume you mean Android here?) so I have quite some experience with them.

The two biggest issues you have to pay attention to are:

- the screen

- the internal storage (flash memory)

Some cheap ones have LCD screens so bad that they're barely usable. Low contrast and extremely narrow watch angles.

Go for IPS screen if you can (will be a tad more expensive)

4 Gb internal storage is not enough. Go for 8 Gb minimum or more. Even though for someone who uses only a handful of apps 4 Gb might be enough, the way internal flash memory is partitioned on most of these tablets makes only ~1 Gb available, which is less than usable. And don't expect to extend storage with an SD card. On most tablets, apps can't be moved to the "real" SD card, only to an internal partition that emulates an SD card.

512 Mb RAM is tight but usable with Android 5.x. I'd prefer 1 Gb though (2 Gb is ample memory IMHO)

Don't expect much more than 2 1/2 hours of continuous use on battery on cheap models. A bare minimum battery capacity is 5000 mAH on a 10 inch tablet. More than this is good.

Basically, you get more or less what you pay for on average and there's a lot of good and bad surprises lurking for you.

I'm currently in France and TV is blazingly fast and responsive.

It's not always been like this, though. I remember having an unpleasant experience for a while a few weeks/months ago.

What kind of hassle? You've done what you were expected to do, register your SIM with your identity backed by your travel documents which were current at that time.

I don't think there's any requirement to update this registration with your new passport number.

I wouldn't bother, really. Whenever you switch to DTAC, use your new passport and that's it.

"Jirou" could be a French last name, but the given names sure don't sound French at all

Seems likely to be a consequence of the ruptured Asia Submarine Cable Express (ASE).

See link posted in #14

I kind of like theregister.co.uk, an IT news web site with a soooo typical British humour. Reading user comments is especially fun.

Being a civil aviation enthusiast (and suffering from mild fear of flying) I also find the pprune.org forum (Professional Pilot's Rumour Network) quite interesting and informative.

Poor little guy. RIP. Sad to see a young live taken so early :-(

Thai parents are always so concerned about their child drowning. Sometimes irrationally like when you play in water 50cm deep just next to them.

I find it hard to believe that a 8yo living next to the sea hasn't been taught to swim properly and I'm glad that the 7yo in my own Thai family is given swimming lessons at school and can now swim very properly.

I'm using TOT with VPN to Northern America. At the moment my download speed is 150Kbps.

As far as I know, VPN can speed up the browsing experience as VPN can use compression and UDP instead of TCP.

Then again, if the DNS servers are far away, the DNS queries can be quite a lot slower.

I very much doubt this (and yes, I'm in that kind of business).

VPN always has to use packet encapsulation of some kind, adding overhead (extra data to the actual payload) that can only slow things down. It also incurs longer paths (more hops).

UDP is not inherently faster than TCP on wide-area networks application-wise. Much to the contrary. TCP is a well-thought protocol with a sliding window for acknowledgments. If you use UDP, you lose all that end-to-end packet handshake so this has to be taken care of by upper protocol layers. I very much doubt that anything much more effective than TCP protocols can be done (one exception to this could be sat links with high latency, something that TCP doesn't handle very well but there are tricks to work around this).

Finally, I don't think that packet compression can change things significantly, given that a large part of the contents sent over usual connections like web browsing or video streaming is already compressed.

I don't think there's any SIM that will allow you to get data at a reasonable rate in the 3 countries either.

If you buy a thai SIM, you'll be roaming in VN and MY and the prices per Mb are likely to be outrageous.

As for Thailand, I generally use a DTAC SIM, the cheapest one in the nearest 7-11 and I subscribe to one of their per-week or per-month data packages: https://www.dtac.co.th/en/prepaid/products/happy-unlimited-internet-package.html

You may want to consider the 1 week / 600 MB 79 bahts package (dial *104*883*9# to subscribe)

Don't know about you, but 600 megs is more than enough for a week for me.

There's a 99 bahts offer with 1 GB (dial *104*884*9#)

And much more, see link above.

Works fairly well in my experience.