Internet Speed In Thailand

[Firefoxx]

FYI, the "unlimited" part of the internet packages here actually refers to the fact that you can connect 24/7. It doesn't actually mean that you can/should download at full throttle 24/7, since that would defeat the pricing structure of consumer ADSL. It stems from the fact that originally all ADSL packages in Thailand were metered, in that you paid by the hour. Cheap international "unlimited" broadband is actually a fairly recent phenomenon here.

[Veazer]

...Plus start with realistic capping of usage, based on the package you have...

yeah, and some basic bandwidth management would help as well, not only capping total downloads.

People can currently takeover unrealistic portions of shared connections simply by breaking downloads into absurd numbers of pieces and thereby having a greater piece of the total pie. This low-tech solution shouldn't work but it does. It also seems that VoIP traffic such as SIP & skype are not getting the traffic priority they should, despite being a small portion of total bandwidth in use. Sometimes I can't manage a 8 or 20 kbps VoIP call on an otherwise idle 1024 connection.

[Firefoxx]

Yep, using the quantity over quality, or sheer numbers, is just what bittorrent is about. Before, any single user could only manage to download a finite number of streams, so everyone was fairly happy and sharing bandwidth more or less equally. You had things like getright or flashget, but even they could only get so many downloads, and they were limited by the servers themselves. Then comes along bittorrent, which allows hundreds of downloads per *file*. Then you have greedy downloaders which use it to download dozens of files simultaneously. The single-stream traffic, like VOIP or plain old web pages, gets pushed out of the picture very easily in this case.

True and other ISPs did try data transfer capping in the very early days, but it was quite ridiculous, something along the lines of 1 or 2GB per month for a 512k line. You could basically use that up within a single day of non-bittorrent use. If you exceeded it, you were cut off, which wasn't good.

Basic bandwidth management, as in prioritizing certain types of packets would be QOS (quality of service) or packet shaping. I'm thinking something like this has been used before, but of course I doubt that anyone at the ISPs would give a straight answer. I actually feel that just as long as the uber-abusers would be kicked out, then QOS wouldn't be necessary.

[makloey]

I called "Internet Thailand" www.inet.co.th, since I've newer heard anybody complaining about them. They could only offer an office/business line on my TOT phone line. About 8000 for 1024 and 4500 for 512.

Do you think they can deliver low latency and full international speed for that price?

Miss my 2048/2048 SDSL connection in Norway

In Norway you get 100% of the speed you pay for. It's actually 120% of rated speed to cover the control data overhead.

[monty]

Example of pricing structure in Australia...

A home package 256/64 kbps at the same price level as in Thailand (19.95A$, or 550 Baht) only gives you 300MB of download capacity...

You want unlimited, price doubles...

http://www2.spin.net.au/products/adsl

[paveet]

Example of pricing structure in Australia...

A home package 256/64 kbps at the same price level as in Thailand (19.95A$, or 550 Baht) only gives you 300MB of download capacity...

You want unlimited, price doubles...

http://www2.spin.net.au/products/adsl

300MB of download capacity.. you could finish that off in a day of heavy browsing.

[Firefoxx]

I mentioned it before... Australia is pretty darn backwards in terms of broadband pricing.

"Internet Thailand" has usually been the cream of the crop with regards to Thai ISPs, in that they provided very good service at a hefty price premium. Consequently they advertised very little and had very few customers. But that was some time ago, I don't know about now. 8k/month for 1mbit is still a bit cheap for a business package, so I think it's more of a shared SME package with a lower contention ratio (maybe 1:10). Expect to pay quite a bit more than that for a real non-shared business line.

[blam]

Hi all. Let me introduce myself, I'm a Thai who has been reading this forum for quite sometime now but mostly in the threads discussing politics. I consider myself a techie in a way. Here's my analysis and a small history+review of the broadband internet (or just internet) in Thailand.

Let me start by giving you a brief history of Thai broadband from the date it started. I gave up 56kbps back in late 2003 when ADSL by True (the local net one first) was just emerging. This was one of the first affordable broadband internet for us. Back in those days, international bandwidth was not a problem as users were still required to pay per hour for "international" internet. If we refer to the NECTEC Internap Map, Thailand had about 3-4gbps of international bandwidth. However, in mid 2004 True offered @truehisp accounts giving unlimited "international" internet. During this time, from a 2.5mbps line I subscribed, I would get about 1.5mbps off-peak and 700kbps peak. BitTorrent and other P2P applications were not shaped (i.e. the ISP's did not put a device which de-pioritised P2P traffic/data). This was acceptable.

However, as times went by the internet speed deterioriated. This was because the number of internet users had grown exponentially (and I meant degrees of ten folds) from mid 2004 to late 2005. Many ISP's emerged including CSLoxinfo who began offering consumer ADSL packages in late 2004. This put constraints on the ever limiting internet gateway. As of year end 2005, Thailand had 7gbps international bandwidth. The fastest growth in international bandwidth came about in late 2006 up till now. As of March 2007, Thailand's international bandwidth has grown over two times since year end 2006 (15gbps vs 7gbps). In my opinion, this was also sparked by the Taiwanese earthquake that Thailand could not only depend on links to the US (such as NTT and Teleglobe). Many links such as the TIS (Telecom Italia Sparkle), C&W (Cable and Wireless UK), FT (French Telecom) were put into place. Thailand now has about 30-40% of it's total bandwidth going through these three international IP transit carriers.

So looking at these figures, it becomes obvious that broadband connection has only become "properly" available to the main consumer market for a maximum of 2-3 years. This is a very short amount of time considering the other places such as the US has had it before the turn of the centuring making it 7-8 years minimum. This is more than the twice the amount of time. (I have my own views towards reasons, influenced by politics, of why during those 2-3 years it didn't grow as fast as it should have.. but that's another story).

So why does Thailand not just buy more bandwidth to the levels of the countries in Europe? The answer to this is distance. The larger the distance, the more it will cost to lay the under water cables, the higher the cost of bandwidth. The world's largest internet exchanges reside in Seattle, New York, Amsterdam and London. The data has to flow through undersea cables (submarine cables) in order to go to these exchanges where most of the web servers (or servers in general) are hosted. Thailand as far as I'm aware has four submarine cable landing. These are APCN (dated back from 1998 landing in Petchaburi; this cable is reaching it's saturation operation limit at 5gbps), SEA-ME-WE2, SEA-ME-WE3 and FLAG (Fibre-Optic Link Around the Globe). Thailand does not have the APCN2 landing point (the newer and much higher capacity (5gbps vs 2.6Tbps!) Asia Pacific Cable Network that was put in place in 2004 linking countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Japan together). The number of cables landing pose a limit on the amount of bandwidth that the country can have. So why not put more cables in the ocean? It's expensive and since it goes through/under international water, it must be a joint international effort.

This brings in the idea of CAT not allowing ISPs to have their own international gateway. This is because it is not feasable. CAT jointly invested with agencies in other countries in laying some of these cables including the APCN which was a joint effort mostly between the ASEAN countries (+ Japan, Taiwan and Korea). It would pose a threat to network stability should everybody (e.g. True) want to have their equipment connected directly to these submarine cables. Plus, the use of these cables for the purpose of peering (internet traffic exchange) is governed by rules written by the agencies that paid the money to lay the cables. The ISPs (such as True) did not pay to lay these cables. Satellite connectivity is unstable (vunerable to weather conditions) and latent. The amount of time for the data to go through the Earth's atmousphere and be relayed back down is a heck of a long time (say 1-2 seconds). The standard in the relaying times of submarine cables of 200ms (0.2s) to US West Coast, 230ms (0.23s) to the UK, satellite communications obviously lags behind. This makes them inappropriate for main uplinks for international bandwidth despite what some people might say.

To conclude, consumer broadband internet access in Thailand is growing rapidly from what it started from back in mid 2004. Given the amount of grown it had in the short amount of time it has had during the past 3 years, it still is in its infant stage. Statistics clearly show that the growth has been accelerating and is still accelerating. Given 3-4 years despite the foremensioned difficulties, I strongly believe that Thailand will catch up in terms of internet service with other more developed nations in the region such as Singapore and Hong Kong (I consider Hong Kong as not China sorry) within the next 3 years.

Thanks for reading

Pavee

PS

When people say companies such as CSLoxinfo have their own international gateway (as they seem to have implied on their website about their Singtel link in Network Status), this remains at most an urban myth. What happens is that they are buying this bandwidth from CAT IIG, but they're buying it on a dedicated scale where the international link to mapped to them 1 to 1. To convince yourself this, try tracerouting (start > run > tracert www.singtel.com) from your computer to Singtel's website on CSLoxinfo. The hops of CAT IIG Service is still there.

PS2

Thailand has better consumer internet connection than Malaysia (believe it or not). TM (Telekom Malaysia) has a monopoly on ADSL media (the actual line) whereas Thailand has TOT, True, ADC, CAT, TT&T and Samart providing the media.

PS3

Don't believe too much propaganda about the downtime of CAT IIG True claims when comparing to TIG on its website.

Sorry to jump in here so late. It is only because the Internet service here in Phuket has become so drastically bad that I had to go looking for a vent. This thread is actually in Google.

Thailand will never be anything close to Singapore or Hong Kong today. They will never even be anything close to Malaysia or Vietnam today either. The reason: Liars, cheaters, inside system nepotism, and bandwidth control manipulators.

The working staff at all of the Internet service providers got their jobs by being someone's cousin or nephew.

It is possible to receive an MCSE (Microsoft) cert here, because you can use cheat sheets. It is NOT possible to cheat your way to a CCNE, CCNA, or Cisco Security cert. Well now, guess what? Thailand has NO THAI CITIZEN THAT HAS ATTAINED ANY THESE CISCO CERTIFICATIONS. They say they have, and have them on their business cards, but when you go to check, the certification registration numbers are nowhere to be found in the engineer placement logs. If you then look further into the CISCO engineering logs, and physical address locations of certified engineers, the entire country of Thailand is nowhere to be found there either. I won't squeal on the fine SYSOP at TTT that forced me to understand this, (he didn't know anything whatsoever about 'frame relay' or basic large network packet management when I talked to him,) so here we are.

Therefore, Thailand cannot attain ANY standard of service here because there are no people here that are real Network Administrators. Farangs do the job for them. And, most farangs bail out of the system within 2 months according to the people at the new Microsoft facility outside of Bangkok. The CAT is a rat's nest, both physically and mentally.

[rant]This place is the worst Internet provider in the world, even Zaire and Morocco have better service for better prices. Period.[/rant]

[bkk_mike]

[rant]This place is the worst Internet provider in the world, even Zaire and Morocco have better service for better prices. Period.[/rant]

You can't call it the worst in the world.

Large tracts of sub-saharan Africa are still stuck with dialup... (although the World Bank has just given Kenya and some other countries loans for rolling out broadband)

Even some parts of the rural US are still stuck with dialup.

I will maybe concede that Bangkok could have the worst Internet in the world for a city it's size.

Edited April 16, 2007 by bkk_mike

[Gary A]

I don't care about excuses or even logical reasons for bad service. The point is that I pay 2,600 baht per month for 1024/512 service and I'm NOT getting what I pay for. If they can't deliver the service why the hel_l do they sell it?

[Deksan]

I don't care about excuses or even logical reasons for bad service. The point is that I pay 2,600 baht per month for 1024/512 service and I'm NOT getting what I pay for. If they can't deliver the service why the hel_l do they sell it?

Because it works , ppl are still paying services that they cant deliver. Also maybe you should check true you d pay only 599 baht I think for another bad service but you d save like 2000 bahts.

[MarkBKK]

If they can't deliver the service why the hel_l do they sell it?

Because people buy it ... ?

[A_Traveller]

If they can't deliver the service why the hel_l do they sell it?

Because people buy it ... ?

And have no choice nor options

Regards

[MarkBKK]

If they can't deliver the service why the hel_l do they sell it?

Because people buy it ... ?

And have no choice nor options

Regards

I do like seeing a sig including ''Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself'' followed by a sig including ''I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own. I am not a number. I am a free man!''

A small thing, but it cheers me up.

Be seeing you!