Sophon Providing Internet Overthe Cable?

[Dirk_brijs]

anybody has more details on this on when this willbe available??

That would a great improvment to the internet in Pattaya

[idle44mins]

anybody has more details on this on when this willbe available??

That would a great improvment to the internet in Pattaya

Last week Sophon signed the intention agreement with a Korean Internetprovider.

Plan is to provide internet by the excisiting cable system as wel as an extra 40 - 60 TV channels.

Time of implementation and the cost for the consumer are not known at the moment.

[ryu]

in 100 years!

TiT

[mamanoodle]

anybody has more details on this on when this willbe available??

That would a great improvment to the internet in Pattaya

Only if there is a great improvement in the sophon cable service too!

[Digger]

Banglamung Cable has the ability to do this as well, or at least thats what they told me when they put cable in my house about 3 years ago. Not sure if they ever got it off the ground, infact, to be honest, I dont think I have watched Banglamung in the last 2 years, so no idea if it still works. Still it was easier for my maid and her husband to have the Thai TV channels than carry another UBC box for them.

So presumably if Banglamung have the right type of cabling - I guess its just a question of money and expertise to bring it all together. I'd actually imagine they could make way more money out of a decent ADSL type service than the rubbish they put on the TV system.

[Dirk_brijs]

Called them and they told they would be ready with renewal of cables etc. in 3 months time at which time they would be calling existing members to ask them if they would be interested or not. If interested a Box (splitter box i presume) will be installed and a trail period of 3 months will be set. After that period they will be charging a yet unknown monthly rate.

[ehs818]

After seeing the news article on TV I went to their office to ask about details. Here is what I was told.

1) There will be a test rollout for a small section of town only, beginning across Sukhumvit in the Soi Country Club area. That will last for 3 months.

2) The next area to be tested would be located in Banglamung or North Naklua. They were 'not sure yet'.

3) Assuming these tests go well (yeah, right), they will offer the services in Pattaya City proper. However, the rollout for this is hoped for beginning about 6 months for now. That mean one year here.

An interesting note though. The staff at the offices has no idea how fast the service will be, or the cost. What do you think you'll get?

[Kerryd]

An interesting note though. The staff at the offices has no idea how fast the service will be, or the cost. What do you think you'll get?

Hard to say, this being where we are of course. One would imagine that broadband cable should be faster and more reliable than ADSL. It would (normally) be more expensive as well. But you have to take in to account that their primary customer base would be Thais, and they couldn't price it through the roof or no one would sign up for it.

Again, this is Thailand, so who knows. They might price it far above what most locals (Thais) would be willing to pay, in the hopes of recouping their expenses quicker. Eventually they'd have to drop the cost to increase their customer base, as they couldn't survive on the few farangs and well-off Thais that would be willing to pay the price.

It would be nice if they put in a whole new system, instead of using existing cabling and switches. Looking at the cabling in my building, I shudder and back away slowly, least the octopus come alive and try to grab me !

[stickyb]

That would a great improvment to the internet in Pattaya

Not necessarily. The infrastructure for existing broadband - the copper telephone cables - is fairly robust. The problems start with the servers and proxies provided by the ISP - and Sophon would have to provide all that as well, so who knows if it would be better. A lot of thye speed problems are with MIOCT and Thailands appalling overseas links.

[monty]

Just talked with a Sophon engineer, who told me the system will be docsid over a HFC network.

Since this is probably Chinese for most of you , docsis is the standard of internet over cable, the standard used by cable modem manufactures to make universally usable modems.

HFC stands for Hybrid-fiber-coax-network. This is where Sophon will have the biggest job, since their current network I think is all coax.

From this diagram you can see the general outlay of a HFC network. Since Sophon does not have such a network currently, they will have to start laying out the fiber cable to the area's they want to serve.

They will be able to partly re-use the cabling going into the houses from for example a single housing estate, as long as they are not taking signal at the back-end of this estate to feed another area in town (or they have to feed that other area from somewhere else)

AFAIK the only upgrade needed there is replace line rf amplifiers with bi-directional units, since internet requires traffic to go both ways...

Now some info about speed. The docsis (2.0) standard allows for an upstream capacity of 30.72 mbps and a downstream capacity of 42.88 mbps on the coax behind the optical node. This speed is shared, so if 500 houses are connected to one optical node, and if all houses were downloading, they would each get 87kbps (= downloading at 11 kBps).

When you install a cable modem, the modem will request a config file from the ISP, where it will find for example the maximum speed to give to you. This might for example be 2048/512. This is clearly a maximum speed setting, since if more then 20 subscribers are trying to download simultaneously, the 42 mbps limit will be reached, any more users and the average speed will begin to go down...

The big question is now, how much bandwidth Sophon will buy?

If they subscribe 500 people with a 512/256 package and charge 500 Baht for it, they will have a revenue of 250,000 Baht. 250,000 Baht would buy them 10mbps of international bandwidth.

This would give, if everybody would be using their internet speed simultanioulsy (of course never happens) a speed of 20.48 kbps (half dial-up speed) or a contention ratio of roughly 25:1

Obviously this is not going to happen, Sophon will be in it to make money out of it.

A 25:1 contention ratio is actually not too bad, most ADSL home packages are at 40:1 or even higher.

So once we know the price/speed level, we can start making wild guesses of how good it will be. My guess if they will charge 750 Baht/month for 512/256, they will be able to deliver reasonable good service (25:1 ratio will give them a retail income of 150% of what their raw product costs)

Any cheaper and the contention will go up fast, with slow daytime speeds as a result...

So the bottleneck will be at the ISP (Sophon) and certainly not at what the cable system can technically deliver us...

[monty]

As an extra, a HFC network can deliver much more channels as well, or alternatively carry HDTV channels!

I recall vaguely to have read that subscribers served by the new HFC network can have up to 60 channels more...

[raro]

I recall vaguely to have read that subscribers served by the new HFC network can have up to 60 channels more...

Let's hope and pray they're not all Pattaya related...

[Langsuan Man]

As one who prays for decent broadband connectivity in Thailand I would not get my hopes up for any improvement in connectivity in Thailand until there is a major reform at Communications Authority of Thailand. Since CAT has a stangle hold on the nodes getting out of Thailand they are the biggest stumbling block to fast internet.

LSM