paveet

What does this page state? http://support.truecorp.co.th/ATB3/accept.jsp

Looks like there is a Data Transfer Limitation

บริษัท ฯ ขอสงวนสิทธิในการยกเลิกการให้บริการ ฯตามสัญญานี้หากปรากฏว่า ผู้ใช้บริการ

นำบริการ ฯ ไปใช้งานแบบต่อพ่วง หรือผู้ใช้บริการนำบริการ ฯ ไปใช้จนมีค่าเฉลี่ยการรับ-ส่ง

ข้อมูลเกินปริมาณที่กำหนด ดังนี้

This translates to "The company would like to reserve the right to cancel the service according to this agreement if it becomes apparant that the user is using the service within a network (in the shared sense I guess, the wording is a bit ambigious..) or the user is having an average data transferred of more than the following..".

So if we take the premium 16mbps package, 4320 MB / hour.. and that there are 720 hours in a month.. that means you don't exceed 3000+ GB a month..

It's just a fair usage clause I reckon, I haven't seen any Thai ISPs cut off their users for heavy usage. It's not the UK ..

As far as I'm aware, TOT has had the rights to use 1885 - 1900 Mhz, 1965 – 1980 Mhz and 2155-2170 Mhz since 1999 but never got a clear indication whether 3G could be offered or not. They used the first two frequency set for GSM 1900 to run the unsuccessful Thai Mobile 1900.

I'm quite sure their new offering is on the 2100 band since my old Nokia E71 (a UMTS 900/2100 Mhz phone) can see the network. For UMTS 2100, you need some bandwidth between 1920-1980 Mhz for the uplink and 2110-2170 Mhz for the downlink (see wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands). You'll also see that there's an overlap between the uplink of 2100 and downlink of 1900, that's why they had to take down the GSM 1900 network to make space (also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands).

The licenses waiting to be auctioned off are 1920-1965 Mhz and 2110-2155 Mhz. This also makes sense since NTC did come out earlier and say they were going to be auctioning off 3 x 10 Mhz and 1 x 15 Mhz blocks. This is a total of 45 Mhz left currently unlicensed on both the downlink and uplink for the 2100 band.

Edit: to correct wikipedia links

This is my guess, Maxnet intercepts outgoing email connections to check them for virus and against spam filters. Are you putting any address in the 'To:' field at all? Try emailing something out with "To:" to yourself and BCC to the rest of the people and see if it still happens. I've seen some mail servers put undisclosed-recipient@<mail server IP address or hostname> as the "To:" name if it wasn't specified.

Also DTAC just started a private trial of 3g on the 850Mhz band. It's only for 2000 people for now, I signed up for it but unfortunately got an SMS 2 days ago that I didn't get selected

I've read on a lot of Thai forums about the increasing True 3g coverage on the 850Mhz band. Some people are getting coverage on even Bangna-Trad, inside Onnut and on Rama II. Where I live, which is about 800 metres in from the main road in Phrom Phong area, I get about 3/5 bars and speeds are around 1.5mbps. The new True iPhone 3GS site claims 2km radius from any BTS/MRT route (see http://www.truemove.com/iphone/eng/3g_wifi.htm).

edit: to correct URL

I think any new True SIM cards bought now would be okay. I just went into a 7-11, asked for a SIM card paying 1 Baht for it. I filled in 90 Baht just in case, called 9779 (or something) which told me to press 2 to enable GPRS/EDGE/MMS on your phone (you could probably also try their contact center 1331). An SMS will come to you comfirming that it has been enabled, took about 10 minutes for mine.

Put the SIM card into the 3G USB data dongle and then I connected, making sure to enable 3G only mode on the dongle (because 3G is free and if you're out of range it wouldn't automatically fall back to GPRS/EDGE which isn't free). I still have 81 Baht left on the SIM card after 30 hours of surfing!

Latency is basically the same as True Internet plus about 40ms because of the nature of connection (going over UMTS/HSDPA rather than DSL). Ping results:

lax.speakeasy.net (US West Coast): 250ms average

nyc.speakeasy.net (US East Coast): 338ms average

www.bbc.co.uk (UK): 333ms average

www.names.co.uk (UK): 366ms average

www.gameserver.hk (Hong Kong): 124ms average

www.singtel.com (Singapore): 77ms average

www.isp-thailand.com (local): 52ms average

Speeds are better today than yesterday.

Oh and if it matters to you, you don't get a public IP (unlike DTAC EDGE).

(Edit to add more details)

Just would like to report that I've been using True 3G around Silom/Rama 4 area for the past few hours. It works quite well and gets ~2mbps local and ~1mbps international. They now have quite good coverage for most inner Bangkok areas. I heard it's been free since around May during their testing period and I haven't had any money deducted from a prepaid SIM i bought specifically for this.

The only catch is that it's on 850Mhz, which is really an American band (used mostly by AT&T). Most phones here are single band 2100Mhz or dual band 900/2100Mhz, but the iPhone 3G/3GS should support this. I'm using a Sierra Wireless Compass 885 USB data dongle from Pantip (3,600 Baht).

Main reason is that TT&T does not have a concession to install/provide phone service in Bangkok, only i the provinces.

Actually, this isn't true. You can opt for a number in Bangkok also, it will be 02 10xxxxx (or 02 100xxxx, I can't remember). The local call costs are 3 baht/call as usual (capped by regulations) but calls within other TT&T Bangkok are free.

They don't actively promote it though (I guess it's not really profit making), I had to ask about it and then she went to recommend me against getting it since it'd have delayed may 10bb setup.

10bb is actually not bad for international near Thailand though.. of course speed falls as distance increases

I got this setup about 1.5 weeks ago, general browsing feels faster than CAT 2/2mbps I had before. I'm only about 500 metres away from the DSLAM though.

When you get things from rapidshare with download managers, it caps the line so that's also quite nice

from today just now at 10.30 - 10.45 pm:

local

places near by

USA... (this is doing better than yesterday.. maybe people are out on Friday nights?)

Europe..

Australia..

I'll leave Africa out of this whole list for you

Problems I've felt with Maxnet after being with CAT for 3.5 years is that they don't have direct links to Europe.

It doesn't have to be a True employee.. a lot of people put servers in data centers just for bittorrenting, I know a lot of people who do this. It's only about 1800-2500 Baht per month (depending on the data center you use). Many also sublet their servers for torrenting for a few hundred Baht a month for (say) 50GB on HDD space and unlimited bandwidth.

Do you know if UK SIP/VoIP companies give out local numbers in UK?

sipgate.co.uk gives free UK local numbers and works flawlessly =)

Although I think they detect your IP and only allows local numbers (as opposed to nasty 0845/0870/etc) from UK based IPs, but of course there are ways to get around this

edit: to add more info

..I went what the heck today when I clicked on the online call center button on the dtac's site. After waiting for about 40seconds, I was presented with a chat window and a request asking to show my webcam. I managed to change my package in about 5 minutes, which was quite good. They even trained their staff to wave goodbye at the end.

haha, it's very gimmicky though

Technical bits, just incase anyone's interested:

> telnet smtp.gmail.com 25

220 [209.85.143.109] ESMTP Smtpd; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:12:44 +0700

...

> telnet a.mx.mail.yahoo.com 25

220 [209.191.118.103] ESMTP Smtpd; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:13:34 +0700

...

..all the same server welcome message and Thai timestamp. The server is definitely local because it replies to my commands instantly (as opposed to the 300ms or so you can feel):

EHLO fakeCAT

250-[209.191.118.103] Hello [119.42.71.xxx], pleased to meet you

250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES

250-PIPELINING

250-8BITMIME

250-SIZE 31457280

250-DSN

250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN

250-DELIVERBY

250 HELP

Notice the no STARTTLS.

Edited: to remove my IP address from what I pasted.

I noticed something odd yesterday night. All connections to whatever server on port 25, SMTP, seems to be connecting to this one particular server which reported itself as the server you try to connect to. Except that it has a Thai timestamp and does not support TLS (encryption). The fact that it didnt support TLS was what made me jump because my university mail server always forced us to use encrpytion or else it wont authenticate at all for the past 2.5 years.

The latest CAT's (incompetent) attempt to block spammers amongst their users?

The government's way of logging people's emails?

I don't know. It went away in the morning today and now it seems to be back again. Anyone noticing anything similar? I'm on CAT's g.shdsl 2/2Mbps and this (along with the 15 hour disconnects) is annoying to the point I signed up for CSLoxinfo 4/1Mbps ADSL today.

DTAC also offers per data, I'm using 140MB for 399 a month. I can't do time because I leave EDGE on 24/7 for push mail.

Nokia maps is also free if you just want it to do what Google Maps offers you (minus a few details). It is the turn-by-turn directions that Nokia charges for, and Google Maps does not offer this functionality either.

(double post)

I've never gotten more than about 120KB/s on HSDPA in the UK either.

Do you mean 120 kilobits per second or 120 kilobytes per second? Using a Samsung EDGE cell phone as a modem just north of Bangkok, I'm getting 220 kilobits per second down and 35 kilobits per second up with 900 ms ping times (according to speedtest.net). Could you try your HSDPA connection with that site and see what numbers it reports?

kilobyte.

Most hotspots in the world are either b or g. Infact I've never seen any n hotspots :|

I've just setup a draft-N (Linksys WRT160N) network in my home and I must say I'm not impressed with it. The speed increases are tiny and the range increase doesn't really.... exist..

For conventional driving I use an old pocket PC (from 2004) along with the Garmin Mobile 10x bluetooth GPS receiver, because the screen is bigger and iGo8 only exists for Pocket PC and not symbian.

I've had the E71 for nearly 2 months now, bought since it first hit the shelves in Bangkok at 16,200 in MBK. The only complaint about it is that it scratches too easily and I can't find a clear plastic case or any slim pouch for it yet (the Nokia supplied pouch in the box is OK, but I don't really like it).

The GPS fix in the E71 is very quick compared to conventional GPS if you enable it to use the mobile network. This is because it will connect through GPRS/EDGE to get satellite hints (i.e. what sattellites are above you right now, depending on approximate cell location and time). I've had a cold start in 15 seconds whereas a cold start would be at least a minute and a half on my Garmin Mobile 10x Bluetooth GPS receiver.

I installed Garmin Mobile XT for Symbian on the E71 along with the South Eastern Asia 2008NT (3.0) on the phone. I have chosen not to use the ESRI versions of the map (Thailand Street Map 8.0 & 8.1) because of their mediocre spellings of the point of interests. The Teleatlas map in South Eastern Asia 2008NT serves me just fine.

I love my E71. Does everything I need, even Exchange Push Mail.

Garmin sells the South Eastern Asia 3.0NT map in the US which includes Thailand. The map source is provided by Teleatlas and the price is in the $1xx range. ESRI has a more detailed map in the countryside but is much more expensive. The latest is Thailand Street Map 8.1, price range is high four digits THB. If you're just driving in Bangkok and sticking to the main national highways the Teleatlas maps should be sufficient. (Don't get the 2.0NT because it'll get you to drive on the wrong side on Sukhumvit, thus running into oncoming traffic!)

I've used both and am currently using iGo8 in Bangkok instead of Garmin Mobile XT just because the interface is nicer, it does Text-to-Speech on street names ("in five hundred metres, turn left onto Silom"), and POI search is MUCH MUCH faster. iGo8 uses Teleatlas maps meaning they are exactly the same as South Eastern Asia 3.0NT.

The only complaint I have with the ESRI version is that the POI are spelt pretty badly in English. I've seen Greyhound Cafe spelt as Geyhaw for example! (edited to add more info)

I've never gotten more than about 120KB/s on HSDPA in the UK either.

Thanks for the suggestion; that's actually the solution I'm using at the moment, what I really like about the nokia SIP client is how well it integrates into the phone itself.