phazey

I think Bud has a rather valid, yet extreme point. If there was indeed any person who alledgedly admitted to any fraud or illegal conduct in these forums, and *if* the thai "cyber" official monitored, then it could become a rather nasty little pickle for the admins. Unless of course the logs are sent to /dev/null - as many a disk space aware admin always points them too

./P

No Poll should be without it's own Theme Tune

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When is Takins new satelite going up? I was led to believe it would offer broadband both ways (unlike the current offering; download only).

It only a matter of time before broad band is available in Thailand. A lot of people want it (including Thais), and it has become defacto standard in the UK now.

I've heard (from an educated source) that Thaicom 4 (iPSTAR) will be up 1st quarter next year. That was a while ago so may not be entirely accurate.

Ipstar is 2 way, always has been, and so was the first vsat service (forgot the name, but cscoms done one with Gilate equipment). Perhaps you are thinking of the CScoms ubc-satallite return system.

AFAIK, there is "broadband" in Thailand, *DSL, Wireless and VSAT...sure its not mbits & mbits, but its faster than modem.

Cheers,

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Just to answer a few up there ^^

Modem bundling is natively supported in XP with no additional software required. When you have two modems installed, just go to the properties of your dial-up connection, and you will see a window with modems and check boxes next to them. check the modems you want to use and dialup - simple.

You might need 2x accounts for your ISP, or the ability to have concurrant logins. 2x phone bills also.

Cheers

./P

This is how I would get more speed....

1) modem choice. get rid of anything that says "softmodem", they are crap(usually internal). The only modem i have ever used, in both Thailand and Burma is a USR Courier. pricy, but solid as a rock. Highly Recommended.

2) Any shell account providers in thailand ? A great way to increase speed is "SSH tunneling". Basically you would log into a box thats live on the internet, and Tunnel your web connection through that - most ISP's do provide a proxy on their side to tunnel through to. Using an SSH2 compatible client for windows (recommend "puTTY.exe" here) it will perform on the fly compression - albeit this will only compress text/html and not images - web speed is greatly improved.

3) if you have more control to a box online, ie: installing stuff and running services, then the software "RaBBit2" for *nix's is good. this will convert images to low quality/small size, remove ads, then compress the whole lot into a .zip file and send you. Your Browser (IE/Netscape) will uncompress on the fly and display the page - the difference visually is not too noticable unless you like superior image quality - but it's all about speed, ain't it

4) get a multithreaded browser. This will download multiple parts of a web page so the "apparent" speed will seem to increase. Recommend either Opera or Mozilla Firebird here.

5) for location where the line quality is questionable DISABLE v.90/92 or any other high speed protocols your modem supports and drop down to 33.6kbps or 28.8kbps. I know what you are already thinking. Here's the beef. When you are running at a higher speed, say 44k, your modem does not actually run at this speed all the time. It will "retrain" when it comes across too many line errors. When i was using the Courier, i could see these errors come in and the modem would pause whilst it sorts itself out, usually a 30 second wait and a retrain to a lower speed. Lowering the speed manually to a non-hispeed protocol will eliminate these pauses. You can do this by entering the relevent "Init string" into your modem properties "extra commands/settings" dialogue in the modem control panel. Again, apparent speed is greatly improved.

Hope this helps, and if i think of any more, i'll pass it on.

Cheers

./P

SeavisionBurma is on a satallite feed. We've spoke and it works well.

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If its "Outlook" everything should be in a file called outlook.pst, or at least with the .pst extension. You can safely copy this file from machine to machine with the minimum of hassle during restoration. (Tools/Options [Mail-Setup] - click the data setup tab.

If it's "Outlook Express" I believe the same is possible, but don't hold me to that. The filename is "inbox.dbx". There are a few more files associated with mail, just do a search and look in the location presented.

Hope this helps,

./P

[Disclaimer] Trying any of the above is at your own risk, and breaking stuff is nothing to do with me

This post was inspired by the thread

"Top 10 dangerous sois in bangkok"

Alough I personally have not been a victim of a mugging or whatever, two friends of mine have, one was involved in a ride by "phone snatch", the other was pickpocketed on a street bridge and lost his wallet.

My wife is always paranoid and warning me about wearing jewelry, carrying money etc when out and about, and i've always done the brash "yeah yeah, it'll never happen to me" kinda thing. Now I am more concerned.

So i guess i'm starting this thread not only for leasons learnt, but also for useful info. I certainly have not been a victim of the above street crimes (prolly cos i dont spend all my time in Thailand/Bangkok) but i am taking more precautions to make myself and my family less of a target when i am there.

So i'll start:

1) spread your cash about your pockets.

2) if you have jewelry, leave it unexposed or at home.

3) if you are walking down a soi taking a phone call, hold on to it, and have an ear on the surroundings.

and then...

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I agree, every time I look at my collegues tiBook all I can say is "wow" and "htf can it do that"...i'm tempted, but alas compatibility gives me cause for concern.

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Anyone here tried Skype ?

The Voice Quality is excellent, and i've had people on a vsat link use it with no problems.

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I'd just like to touch on the point about IPStar.

You can expect to see the maximum download rate to jump up quite considerably without a huge price impact. The satallite which is dedicated to service the region (Thaicom4) launches in 1st qtr 2004 (according to the last information i had) - it'll supposedly be able to cater 40gbits of data up there.

I've personally had an ipstar terminal up to 2.2mbits and know it can go quite a bit higher, but then things like reflector size come into play then....

just FYI

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I think the relevent information is here:

http://www.ais900.com/mobilelife/faq/gprs.htm

Alough it's in Thai and as I am just bearly learning to count, i could be mistaken.

cheers

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There is no "cost per minute" as it's an always on connection, which is why I *think* its a per-Kilobyte charge. I'll have a quick shufty around the AIS/Mobilelife website to clarify tho.

Cheers

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Hi,

I stumbled on something quite interesting last week, dunno if it's common knowledge here but hey, can't hurt to share it.

I use my mobile phone as a modem for my laptop quite a bit - sometimes in my house the phone line is not always available etc (Is'nt it unbearable how long some of these family phone conversasions go on for?!). I was also getting a bit frustrated at the speed - 9600bps is painful at the best of times.

So anyways, here i am waiting for Hotmail or something to load, and it dawned on me, the mobile has GPRS Internet - the damm thing is quicker than my laptop right now. So what if its possible to share that connection with the lappy and at least get a reasonable speed. The good point here is that it's easily possible.

As long as you have 1) a GPRS Enabled Phone with Bluetooth or IRDA (i can only vouch that a Nokia 7650 does work) 2) a bluetooth adapter (alough i think i saw IRDA also worked, but i have not tried) then you are ready to get online.

You;ll see a connection named "BlueTooth Connection" - normaly you'll enter your ISP details here, username,pass and phone number. But then you'll be using the phone as a modem and not a network device.

The trick here, is to enter NO username and password, and a phone number of: *99#

It'll verify and connect quite quickly - and thats it, your laptop is now on the GPRS network at 40kbps - a damm sight quicker than before.

Now perhaps a word of warning. I could be mistaken, but i believe GPRS has a data charge of 1 satang per KB - if this is incorrect then please accept my appologies. As i only use my lappy for messaging and SMS, the traffic is quite low - but in the times i do need to web browse, i'll use LYNX - which is a test only browser (alough you could always turn off images in IE etc). If used carefully, i reckon this could be a better (and quicker) way of mobile net access. Also remove the factor of paying for the phone call and ISP account charges.

And thats it. If someone gains something out of this, then I guess my job is done.

Cheers

./P