Anybody Actually Know What Is The Problem With Int'l Access?

[nickbkk]

I know we've "enjoyed" sporadic ups and down (mostly downs) with internet access across all ISPs here in Thailand for a few years now. There have been the occasional lovely surprises. About a week after the earthquake off Taiwan that gave us the last major outage, for a few hours I enjoyed the most amazing pageload speeds. Pages from North America and Europe were loading almost as quickly as I could release my finger from the mouse button when I clicked on links. It was uncanny. Of course, that was then followed by weeks of sigfnificant problems so God only knows what happened that one glorious afternoon.

I regularly enjoy torrenting at anything up to 200KB but TVU, another P2P application, has for a few weeks steadfastly refused to load any content at all, even the mighty FOX News, which used to provide almost seamless viewing. I even enjoyed a most eminently viewable Formula 1 race from the Brazilian GP. This week, it's hopeless.

I know it's not just TOT (which provides my home ADSL at 2mb) because I have both an AsiaNet/True DSL line (512/512 and superior contention ratio to consumer DSL) and a CS Loxinfo 4mb SME ADSL line at my office and those are both crap, too. I hear from reliable sources that True's 4mb consumer ADSL is currently also biting bronto balls.

Tonight on TOT at home, the Speakeasy Seattle test server is showing me to be enjoying the most impressive bandwidth of 46kbs on download and 136kbs on uploads. Even routing the Seattle test through a secure tunnel to my dedicated server in Singapore is only giving me 137/down 326/up.

If the problem was contention ratios on the local ADSL circuit I presume my torrenting would go down the toilet, too.

So what's the deal?

Is it simply a case of Thai ADSL having penetrated the market to such a degree that we're all clogging CAT?

Is it the usual inept network management?

Is it packet-shaping gone wrong? CAN they even hope to apply meaningful packet shaping to my SSH-tunneled packets?

Have they simply decided that anything that cannot be served via http proxies can get stuffed?

I haven't tried Skype lately but I presume that would suffer as well?

I regularly scour these and other forums for constructive suggestions but does anybody actually KNOW the real answers?

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi

I have the exact same problem..... having just gotten TRUE's "super highspeed" deal at 1.5M/512k as opposed to my previous 512/256, i have to say that from the moment i got it (yesterday only) my speed is not, as wished for, 3x faster.... but instead 50% slower! Where on the 512/256 i regularly got something in the range of 500/200 i am now suffering from 240/100-ish.

It sucks.

But maybe there's some of that "international-general-breakdown" going on again and it will become faster again.... let's see.......

Best regards.....

Thanh

[Dissolution]

I have a 3mbps True "Super Highspeed" package.

It seems that according to Speedtest the cap is 3mb, but what you actually get varies widely. I play WoW and my average ping is ~800ms, and can go as high as 2000-3000+ms.

Isn't there supposed to be a direct link to the US completed at the end of 2007?

[nickbkk]

Well, I might have to edit the title of this thread.

I ran some tests today on all three DSL services I use.

Here are the results:

Asianet 512/512kb DSL at hours 1639 - 1645

Seattle server

Download Speed: 439 kbps (54.9 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 171 kbps (21.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 197 kbps (24.6 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 169 kbps (21.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 438 kbps (54.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 170 kbps (21.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

San Francisco server

Download Speed: 278 kbps (34.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 173 kbps (21.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 430 kbps (53.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 185 kbps (23.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 437 kbps (54.6 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 178 kbps (22.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

CS Loxinfo SME 2mb/512kb ADSL at hours 1650-1700

Seattle server

Download Speed: 1230 kbps (153.8 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 202 kbps (25.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 2144 kbps (268 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 201 kbps (25.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 1837 kbps (229.6 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 202 kbps (25.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

San Francisco server

Download Speed: 2167 kbps (270.9 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 215 kbps (26.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 2312 kbps (289 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 214 kbps (26.8 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 2268 kbps (283.5 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 214 kbps (26.8 KB/sec transfer rate)

TOT GoldCyber 2mb/512kb at hours 1930

Seattle server

Download Speed: 67 kbps (8.4 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 178 kbps (22.3 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 107 kbps (13.4 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 180 kbps (22.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Download Speed: 87 kbps (10.9 KB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 177 kbps (22.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

I got too depressed at this point to bother continuing with the test.

Just to be sure it isn't the contention ratio on my local circuit, I tried whacking up the torrenting volume. Within 30 minutes of the Seattle server test, I manaaged to get it up to 177kB/s. That's 1,449,984 bps, or roughly 1.5Mbs.

TOT has a serious problem with international connectivity, methinks.

I'm calling TOT tomorrow to ask them to provide 1 good reason why I should continue to pay anything.

Anybody run any tests of Buddy Broadband lately?

[monty]

Would you mind mentioning the prices for the respective packages? I think you will see a direct connection between speed/price!

I know the loxinfo sme 256/128 already costs 2000 Baht/month, which is double the price compared to the TOT goldcyber for a quarter of the speed (which makes it actually 8 times more expensive, so you would expect speeds close to the rated speed!)

[nickbkk]

Would you mind mentioning the prices for the respective packages? I think you will see a direct connection between speed/price!

I know the loxinfo sme 256/128 already costs 2000 Baht/month, which is double the price compared to the TOT goldcyber for a quarter of the speed (which makes it actually 8 times more expensive, so you would expect speeds close to the rated speed!)

And you're a Super Moderator?

Gee, thanks so much for stating the blindingly oblivious.

Edited October 29, 2007 by nickbkk

[nickbkk]

For the pedants out there, here are the prices:

AsiaNet/True 512/512 DSL: 12,000 baht per month

CS Loxinfo SME 2mb/512kb ADSL: 7000 baht per month

TOT GoldCyber 2mb/512: 1000 baht per month

Please explain how this logic about price/performance applies?

I used to get 800-1000 kbs with TOT. Even on bad days, I still saw 400+.

Suddenly, a few weeks ago, the TOT service basically died and now I "enjoy" international bandwidth in the 50-150kbs range. TOT have even so helpfully bumped the package up so that for my 1000 baht per month, I now get a nominal 2mbs bandwidth. However, the international bandwidth is as crap as ever. If often get BBC Radio streams buffering and they're not much more than 20kbs, if that.

The point I made when I started this thread was that I thought there was a problem across the board with international bandwidth. I based that on several weeks of in-depth investigation of various issues with 3 Thai ISPs, as well as network conditions abroad. Blackhole routers, screwed-up routing tables, inept routing, petulant and dead DNSes - I've seen them all in the last few weeks, and the issues have by no means been confined to Thailand. However, I've also mapped some of THE most ridiculous network routing in the Bangkok area by the MOST expensive of these ISPs. How about packets that travel from Silom to Bang-Na Trad, back in to Rama IV, back out to Bang-Na Trad, back in towards Silom, before heading off to CAT. The true marks of top(ology, ah ah) network professionals at work?

Yeah, a real solid relationship between price and performance.

The point I made when I posted the latest bandwidth measurements was that perhaps my original contention that this was a problem across all ISPs was inaccurate and in fact, TOT is the one ISP truly at fault.

So, bearing all of the above in mind, perhaps someone could respond as I originally asked, that is if you KNOW what is going on?

Thanks ever so much.

[Prasert]

I think we'll never know what is exactly going on. The direct cause is probably a technical mis-configuration, but to solve this, one has to look at the bigger picture. TOT management is probably the biggest mess - 7 directors in the last 18 months if I'm correct. If management is not plotting a straight course, one can't expect employees to take over that responsibility, especially not with the Thai culture in mind.

As for the technical part: how many Thai network engineers do you know that can read and speak English? Because every single manual about high-end networking equipment is only available in English. If you don't understand it, don't expect to understand the equipment.

Thailand is very conservative about farang working in Telecommunications, especially when it comes down to farang businesses. Skilled (read: farang) engineers could probably solve the current issues within days, but it will only be temporary as the main method of working for the Thai engineers is still trial-and-error.

I've seen examples of the above myself, from TOT networking engineers and CSLoxinfo networking engineers. Anything above basic networking level baffles them completely. They're basically all working for the same company: C&W

.............Clueless & Worthless

[monty]

And you're a Super Moderator?

Being supermoderator doesn't make an all seeing and knowing being

After reading your original post, I can see the silliness of my post, my only excuse being this forum often getting swamped with home package customers complaining that they're not getting 100% of their rated speed 24/7 on their p2p clients. They are often of the idea that they pay for the speed, so they better keep it running 100% 24/7 otherwise they're not getting their money's worth!

So yep, Prasert is hitting the nail on the head, very poor advanced networking skills and clueless management are the reason for the results you are getting.

Expanding on this, unfortunately this is partly the result of the above mentioned 100% downloaders (of stuff they will never ever use, see or listen to).

They are overloading the international bandwidth, and the technicians don't have the know how on how to properly control all that traffic.

They can increase the contention ratio, but a p2p client can act as 100 consumers (read simultaneous connections, thus skewing the contention ratio) still giving high download speeds , but a single http connection has no bandwidth left over. Probable reason your P2P steams along, but all the other, single connection type of traffic grinds to a halt.

Then the technicians with no English skills have to research on how to control this p2p traffic problem. This initiates major problems when they start experimenting with a subject they don't understand yet!

The bandwidth management at my resort is probably more advanced then what most ISP's come up with (dual WAN, load balancing & failover managed by the open source PFSENSE linux package, with both user, port and application based QOS)

Add to that the management problem, they are giving the bandwidth away virtually free to people on the cheapest packages, a proper fair use clause (and implementation of it) would alleviate loads of the bandwidth problems.

Just a few days ago one of my customers was boasting he downloaded over 250 Gb of junk last month on his 1 mbps home package (that's 500 hours of high quality divx movie material, or almost 16 hours/day). Where I come from in the West, his speed would have been cut back to dial-up level after the first week of the month!

So that's what we're stuck with, and that's the reason why at my place I have two internet sources (both of the SME type), with different carriers and different ISP's. I need it since I have plenty of business travelers, who would check out in a second if their internet was down for over 30 minutes...

One of them is the CAT, and they mess up quite a lot, which is worrisome since they provide the majority of the international bandwidth!

'Fraid nothing much we can do

[nikster]

Gonna leave TOT and try my luck with CAT now. I was at CAT CM headquarters yesterday and had a chat with some engineers that did know what they were talking about...

TOT speeds during daytime have been in the toilet ever since the 2Mbit upgrade. Could be a co-incidence if you believe in such things...

[gharknes]

there has been a problem with international access for 2 weeks now, TT&T informed me it won't be 100% for another week

[cali]

ISP’s don’t tell people what they are really buying; it is sort of a truth in advertising issue. The only thing they advertise is how much it costs for how much speed. Like 599 baht for 512/256. They specify nowhere there is a dramatic difference between domestic and international. They specify nowhere the effective speed you are likely to see. They specify nowhere they artificially cripple torrents and many other things. They specify nowhere the scope of outages here and there that continually plague the quality of service. And what does Joe Farang who comes from a country with a 20000/20000 connection for 500 baht a month expect? He expects exactly what he purchased, he better at least get such puny numbers as 512/256 for everything, all of the time or he will become irate. And what does he get? Nothing close to it, ever. So what you have here is a collision course of false expectations.

You can try justify using ISP’s lack the skills/controls, blame upstream CAT prices, blame the vague clauses of ISP’s not guaranteeing their speeds, but when it comes down to it the real problem is the ISP’s don’t care about the speed the customers get. When frustrated customers complain, what is the ISP response? Silence. They could care less about your speed and they ignore you. They sign up more customers and the speed gets worse and they ignore you. They cripple even more things and ignore you. Then they announce in press releases speed is not a problem for customers. That is the model and everyone has to go through this learning experience. You are at their mercy of whatever speed they choose to give you and chances are that’s not going to be very much.

[Prasert]

I can understand Cali's complains from a customers point of view, but one can simply not compare the situation in Europe or America with Asia.

Asia is in general 8 years behind on technology used for internet connectivity.

Specifiying speeds is something I do not do on my network. Because the only thing that the general public understands, is speed.....

I never had a customer asking about delay, packet loss or other very important factors that determine the speed you get.

For me, it's important how fast a webpage appears on your screen. Most businesses on the network here use the internet for webbrowsing, email, skype and msn. That traffic is prioritized. And it's relatively fast.

10 computers browsing the web simultaneously, will use an average of 100kbps. That's 10% average use of a 1Mbps connection. So adding another 40 computers browsing the web will create an average load of 500kbps. The remaining 500kbps is used for all requests peaking shortly to 1Mbps. Another term for this is contention ratio.

This is exactly what adsl was intended for in the first place. When those 50 computers each start downloading torrents, you can understand that all available bandwidth will be saturated within seconds, crippling all traffic.

And this is what's happening for most ISPs in Thailand at the moment. So what's next?

Blaming the P2P downloaders?

Blaming the ISPs for not delivering the bandwidth?

If you start going that direction, you're doing the same as all the Thai: complaining but being totally unable to come up with a solution. Everybody will come up with arguments that will justify their use of the internet. P2P downloaders want their full speed (on a 1:1 contention ratio), internet cafe owners want fast browsing for their customers. And the majority prefers to remain illiterate when it comes down to knowledge about networking - which is the case at most Thai ISPs.

So yes, I tell my customers their line is 2.3Mbps up and down. Until the other end of that line. How fast the internet is? Depends on the number of users, the type of traffic and the international connections. I do not give numbers for speed. Don't like it? Choose another provider.

[nickbkk]

10 computers browsing the web simultaneously, will use an average of 100kbps. That's 10% average use of a 1Mbps connection. So adding another 40 computers browsing the web will create an average load of 500kbps. The remaining 500kbps is used for all requests peaking shortly to 1Mbps. Another term for this is contention ratio.

This is exactly what adsl was intended for in the first place. When those 50 computers each start downloading torrents, you can understand that all available bandwidth will be saturated within seconds, crippling all traffic.

If the problem had gradually arisen, yes, I could see that it might be a result of a lot of torrenting. However, as I said before, until a fairly sharply delineated point in time about 3 weeks ago, I was enjoying most of my 1mb download bandwidth with all forms of internet usage: http, https, ftp, smtp/pop3, VOIP, P2P, streaming audio and video.

Suddenly, that changed.

Many packet-switching networks do not degrade gracefully. If you try to put too much water through a water pipe, it will carry the maximum volume possible and simply refuse the rest. With most IP networks, If you try to shove in too much data, the entire network tends to fail. It takes some rather artistic and expert implementation of technology and topology to avoid catastrophe. In my experience, artistry and expertise are in short supply everywhere in the world. I can't imagine there has been a stampede of top network engineers in the direction of Thailand's consumer ISPs.

If TOT was busy selling a load of ADSL accounts and also suddenly doubled the bandwidth of all of its existing users, I imagine it would be possible to court disaster.

However, I would have thought the (links to) international links that TOT appears to have blown would have been of fairly industrial nature, which should be a bit more resiliant and stable than the average home LAN.

Which brings us back to my original (and repeated) request: does anybody KNOW?

[nickbkk]

And you're a Super Moderator?

Being supermoderator doesn't make an all seeing and knowing being

Fair enough, but really, you ought to read what you're moderating, chai mai na krap?!? Tip of the hat for the apology. If only we could get the rest of the world to do that. We might even win a Nobel Prize but fat lot of value that has any more

Yes, I understand how boring it can be dealing with the "under-informed". I was once asked by a manager at the Internet arm of a major telco, "How do I get a webpage?"

I am not making that up. Those were her exact words.

The thing that really, really pained me? Knowing that it would take years of education to bring her to the point where she would even begin to appreciate the almost-beautiful irony of her question. The problem with almost-beautiful irony is that it's akin to almost not falling out of an airplane or almost not getting run over by a truck.

I know it's totally off-topic and off-thread but we're not really getting anywhere, anyway, so... This one time, at band camp.....

At the time, though I was responsible for content on three major portals and the free customer web hosting of at least three sets of access customers using dial-up, ISDN and ADSL, if I suspected any issues with the hosting of those portals and that customer webspace, I had to call the same support desk the customers used.

Bear in mind that this was the late 1990s and by this point I not only had 20 years' hands-on experience of most flavours of computer and close to a decade of internet useage behind me, but I was also sitting in the company HQ, accessing the internet via a pretty tasty pipe into one of the backbones that supported many of the POPs.

"Hi, this is ****** at **** Internet. Is there a problem with the ******.com server?"

"Hello sir, my name is SomeSupportGrunt, I just need to ask you a few questions."

"Um, no that's ok thanks. I'm the ***** of **** Internet. I call you guys most days. I just need to know the status of the server."

"OK, sir, now what's the problem?"

"The problem is that the server seems to be responding sluggishly. I've checked the network and there appear to be no problems, so I need to check if you're aware of a problem with the server."

"Ok, sir, how are you connecting to the internet? Are you using a dial-up modem or are you a fast-internet customer?"

"Actually, I have the entire ISP plugged into my butt. I didn't think bandwidth like that was going to actually fit, but it's amazing what you can do with a little soap. I'm not sure if it's the soap that's making my eyes water, however. I've posted a screengrab to goatse.cx so you can tell me where I went wrong."

Ok, so that last bit is really from my big new business book, "What I Should Have Said to the CEO" but you'd be amazed (or horrified) by the things I actually DID say to bosses along the way. Or maybe, given my posts to TV, not amazed. But still horrified.

And if you have to ask why I couldn't get a better way support the servers, you obviously have no experience of the public sector OR telcos.

THAT's why I don't blame Thais for every little thing that goes wrong. I know what it's like in the so-called "real" world. Etcetera blather.....

[Hobox]

"Hello sir, my name is SomeSupportGrunt, I just need to ask you a few questions."

Just called the support of MaxNet and right after "Pleeese pless nyn fo enliss" (How come even the person speaking on their aswering machine can't speak understandable english?) I got the exact same person.

Needless to say they never even heard about anyone else having slow connections...

I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the Internet connections and the low quality of service in LOS.

I saw that SingTel had some advertisements in Phuket for ADSL. Anyone know anything about them?

Do I connect through Singapore then or do I still exit Thailand through CAT?

[JetsetBkk]

Did anyone else have zero access to Hotmail today - 31st October? And zero access to Thaivisa?

It's been worse than when the cable got cut a few months ago. Absolutely no Hotmail, although GMail was getting through.

And the other crazy thing was, torrents were screaming down at about 100-150 KB/s during the evening, which is virtually unheard of.

And then suddenly at about 03:25 this morning, the email started working and access to TV started working.

[Prasert]

Did anyone else have zero access to Hotmail today - 31st October? And zero access to Thaivisa?

It's been worse than when the cable got cut a few months ago. Absolutely no Hotmail, although GMail was getting through.

And the other crazy thing was, torrents were screaming down at about 100-150 KB/s during the evening, which is virtually unheard of.

And then suddenly at about 03:25 this morning, the email started working and access to TV started working.

There where several major routing issues yesterday, but outside of Thailand. Traffic that was sent over the Singtel and Qwest backbones had a very high latency (over 2 seconds), but now all traffic is handled well again. Some major routes flapped several times, causing parts of the internet to be unreachable for several minutes.

[apetley]

I can understand Cali's complains from a customers point of view, but one can simply not compare the situation in Europe or America with Asia.

Asia is in general 8 years behind on technology used for internet connectivity.

Of course you can compare Europe and America with Asia.

Most of Europe and America are way behind the Japs and Koreans. Just look at their plans for nationwide ultra highspeed wireless access so the technology is there and being developed in Asia.

What the third world Asian countries dont have is investment in their infrastructure and until they do just wont have a world class internet service.

[monty]

Of course you can compare Europe and America with Asia.

Most of Europe and America are way behind the Japs and Koreans. Just look at their plans for nationwide ultra highspeed wireless access so the technology is there and being developed in Asia.

What the third world Asian countries don't have is investment in their infrastructure and until they do just wont have a world class internet service.

A very big difference is the location of the webhosts.

I've read (and can believe) that the majority of websites visited by both Japanese and Korean surfers are actually located in Japan and Korea respectively.

The load on international bandwidth in those countries is very low. They have their own p2p networks, their own versions of youtube, all located within their countries...They get these high speeds only on local surfing, just like we get close to rated speeds when doing tests on servers located within Thailand!

In Thailand, even many of the smaller Thai language and some of the bigger websites are hosted in America. Bangkokpost, contrary to popular belief, is hosted in the USA (viawest in Denver), both the .com and the .co.th extensions lead to Viawest!

This results in a very heavy load on the international bandwidth in Thailand. The ISP's are quite reluctant in offering higher connection speeds to their customers (adsl 2+ is already used in Thailand, allowing 24mbits down and 2.5 mbit up) but what is the point when the international bandwidth is not there to support these high connection speeds to your ISP...The only thing their customers complain about is international speed anyway!!!

My CAT connection (4mbps down, 1 mbps up) uses adsl2+ modulation, and from following screenshot, those who know the numbers will see my line could support probably close to 20 mbps down while retaing a 12 or more snr margin (currently 31)...

[JetsetBkk]

Did anyone else have zero access to Hotmail today - 31st October? And zero access to Thaivisa?

It's been worse than when the cable got cut a few months ago. Absolutely no Hotmail, although GMail was getting through.

And the other crazy thing was, torrents were screaming down at about 100-150 KB/s during the evening, which is virtually unheard of.

And then suddenly at about 03:25 this morning, the email started working and access to TV started working.

There where several major routing issues yesterday, but outside of Thailand. Traffic that was sent over the Singtel and Qwest backbones had a very high latency (over 2 seconds), but now all traffic is handled well again. Some major routes flapped several times, causing parts of the internet to be unreachable for several minutes.

Thanks for that into. Last night it (this morning) all started OK at 03:25, but what I didn't post - because I couldn't - was that it all went down again at 04:30. Still, it was up long enough for me to pick up my emails.

Seems OK so far today.

[onethailand]

A very big difference is the location of the webhosts.

I've read (and can believe) that the majority of websites visited by both Japanese and Korean surfers are actually located in Japan and Korea respectively.

The load on international bandwidth in those countries is very low. They have their own p2p networks, their own versions of youtube, all located within their countries...They get these high speeds only on local surfing, just like we get close to rated speeds when doing tests on servers located within Thailand!

Well put. And it's true.

In Thailand, even many of the smaller Thai language and some of the bigger websites are hosted in America. Bangkokpost, contrary to popular belief, is hosted in the USA (viawest in Denver), both the .com and the .co.th extensions lead to Viawest!

This results in a very heavy load on the international bandwidth in Thailand. The ISP's are quite reluctant in offering higher connection speeds to their customers (adsl 2+ is already used in Thailand, allowing 24mbits down and 2.5 mbit up) but what is the point when the international bandwidth is not there to support these high connection speeds to your ISP...The only thing their customers complain about is international speed anyway!!!

Well, this is the problem - first of all, hosting in Thailand is way more expensive than hosting in the US. Secondly, back when the Net first arrived in Thailand (mid 90s) - there wasn't any choice at all for Thai companies - either you hosted in the US, or you didn't have a website.

So Bangkok Post hosted overseas - where, it could also be argued, being on the international backbone and serving overseas customers was more important than serving local customers who they'd prefer to buy the print edition.

Bandwidth in Thailand has sucked miserably for ages, there has never been enough to satisfy demand - so it should come as no surprise that anyone in Thailand who can maximize his/her usage of bandwidth will do just that. The only ISP that actually managed their bandwidth carefully back in the early days, and probably still the only ISP who manages their bandwidth properly today, is Internet Thailand.

[nickbkk]

Man, there is some FUD on the net, especially in here. If ignorance is bliss, I envy so many people who post to TV forums.

1. Statements like "you can't compare North America and Europe to Asia," when meant to imply that Asia, as a block, suffers in terms of infrastructure, investment, technology and internet bandwidth are incredibly ignorant and pointless. The term Asia covers everything from perhaps Afghanistan (and, arguably, Turkey) all the way to Japan in the East, Siberia in the North and what Indonesia in the South? However, even if we assume "Asia" is mistakenly meant to refer to Southeast Asia and Pacific rim Asian nations, the statement is pointless. Nationas like Japan, HK and Singapore are most definitely 1st world, while China, Vietnam and Laos, on the other hand, are at different stages along the path from 2nd world to 1st, though Laos "enjoys" mostly 3rd world characteristics. Thailand is struggling with its endless, fitful attempts at solidifying its place in the 1st world. And what is Malaysia? There is a world of difference between internet access, domestically AND internationally, between Singapore and Burma, but they are both in Asia.

"Bandwidth in Thailand has sucked miserably for ages" Huh? Thailand actually has some pretty dam_n impressive domestic internet infrastructure.

ALL of Asia suffers from the same critical issues as far as foreigners are concerned, however: bandwidth to the "real" internet, whose center of gravity is somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, between the USA and Europe. The "real" internet isn't interested in content here, is it? ISPs here have to pay the cost of the ENTIRE link from here to the "real" internet. That's not cheap. Cut them some slack.

It's very unfair to expect anything even close to the quality of access (bandwidth and latency) here that you might take for granted in the population centres of Europe and North America. If you think your options for reliable, affordable bandwidth suck (in the wrong way) here, try moving to the middle of nowhere in the USA.

2. For reasons of language, culture, tradition, many Asian countries simply don't need to support YOUR access to Hotmail, YouTube, Google.com, etc. For example, there's a very good reason why Japanese countries ruled the fax machine industry and almost totally missed the PC boat.

3. If you think customer service sucks here, try living in Malaysia for a while. They even "benefitted" from British rule, so you can't go there and blame education, culture or whatever.

4. You really think so many people in Thailand are browsing The Nation and the Bangkok Post websites that Thailand's international bandwidth is being hit? Please....

5. There has never been enough bandwidth here to satisfy demand? Please direct me to this mythical land where there IS enough bandwidth to satisfy demand.

All this debate over bandwidth in/into Thailand will soon be moot, anyway. In addition to clean water and air, we'll soon be killing each other for IP addresses. That's IF all that "endlessly available" bandwidth you all seem to think exists in the "real" world hasn't already collapsed under the weight of streaming HD video; full-page Flash-video "designer" websites; Windows Vista updates; Bluray torrents; misbehaving CISCO routers; commercial, military and political botnet attacks by Russia and China; Californian brushfires; and rolling power outages.

In the meantime, I'm more concerned about news articles combining phrases like "laptop per child," "shared by a number of children," "free and open," and "Canadian."

Y'all have a nice day, now.

[gharknes]

Man, there is some FUD on the net, especially in here. If ignorance is bliss, I envy so many people who post to TV forums.

1. Statements like "you can't compare North America and Europe to Asia," when meant to imply that Asia, as a block, suffers in terms of infrastructure, investment, technology and internet bandwidth are incredibly ignorant and pointless. The term Asia covers everything from perhaps Afghanistan (and, arguably, Turkey) all the way to Japan in the East, Siberia in the North and what Indonesia in the South? However, even if we assume "Asia" is mistakenly meant to refer to Southeast Asia and Pacific rim Asian nations, the statement is pointless. Nationas like Japan, HK and Singapore are most definitely 1st world, while China, Vietnam and Laos, on the other hand, are at different stages along the path from 2nd world to 1st, though Laos "enjoys" mostly 3rd world characteristics. Thailand is struggling with its endless, fitful attempts at solidifying its place in the 1st world. And what is Malaysia? There is a world of difference between internet access, domestically AND internationally, between Singapore and Burma, but they are both in Asia.

"Bandwidth in Thailand has sucked miserably for ages" Huh? Thailand actually has some pretty dam_n impressive domestic internet infrastructure.

ALL of Asia suffers from the same critical issues as far as foreigners are concerned, however: bandwidth to the "real" internet, whose center of gravity is somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, between the USA and Europe. The "real" internet isn't interested in content here, is it? ISPs here have to pay the cost of the ENTIRE link from here to the "real" internet. That's not cheap. Cut them some slack.

It's very unfair to expect anything even close to the quality of access (bandwidth and latency) here that you might take for granted in the population centres of Europe and North America. If you think your options for reliable, affordable bandwidth suck (in the wrong way) here, try moving to the middle of nowhere in the USA.

2. For reasons of language, culture, tradition, many Asian countries simply don't need to support YOUR access to Hotmail, YouTube, Google.com, etc. For example, there's a very good reason why Japanese countries ruled the fax machine industry and almost totally missed the PC boat.

3. If you think customer service sucks here, try living in Malaysia for a while. They even "benefitted" from British rule, so you can't go there and blame education, culture or whatever.

4. You really think so many people in Thailand are browsing The Nation and the Bangkok Post websites that Thailand's international bandwidth is being hit? Please....

5. There has never been enough bandwidth here to satisfy demand? Please direct me to this mythical land where there IS enough bandwidth to satisfy demand.

All this debate over bandwidth in/into Thailand will soon be moot, anyway. In addition to clean water and air, we'll soon be killing each other for IP addresses. That's IF all that "endlessly available" bandwidth you all seem to think exists in the "real" world hasn't already collapsed under the weight of streaming HD video; full-page Flash-video "designer" websites; Windows Vista updates; Bluray torrents; misbehaving CISCO routers; commercial, military and political botnet attacks by Russia and China; Californian brushfires; and rolling power outages.

In the meantime, I'm more concerned about news articles combining phrases like "laptop per child," "shared by a number of children," "free and open," and "Canadian."

Y'all have a nice day, now.

to be honest when my connection is working as it should i don't eally have a problem wit thailand infrastructure, i think the problem is customer service, by that i mean it is unreliable, i assume this is because they don't care or they lack the skills to maintain a good reliable service, either way it sucks, perhaps if penalties where introduced things might change - no service no money (pipe dream) they have a bit of work to do right now, i have to reset my modem up to 5 times 5 times every day now to get a decent connection and that's when it is working, serious problems that seam to be getting worse.

[JetsetBkk]

Did anyone else have zero access to Hotmail today - 31st October? And zero access to Thaivisa?

It's been worse than when the cable got cut a few months ago. Absolutely no Hotmail, although GMail was getting through.

And the other crazy thing was, torrents were screaming down at about 100-150 KB/s during the evening, which is virtually unheard of.

And then suddenly at about 03:25 this morning, the email started working and access to TV started working.

There where several major routing issues yesterday, but outside of Thailand. Traffic that was sent over the Singtel and Qwest backbones had a very high latency (over 2 seconds), but now all traffic is handled well again. Some major routes flapped several times, causing parts of the internet to be unreachable for several minutes.

Thanks for that into. Last night it (this morning) all started OK at 03:25, but what I didn't post - because I couldn't - was that it all went down again at 04:30. Still, it was up long enough for me to pick up my emails.

Seems OK so far today.

Same thing has happened today - 3rd November. No international access. Have only just been able to get to Thaivisa at 3:30 am (4th Nov).

This is getting beyond a joke.

[nickbkk]

to be honest when my connection is working as it should i don't eally have a problem wit thailand infrastructure, i think the problem is customer service, by that i mean it is unreliable, i assume this is because they don't care or they lack the skills to maintain a good reliable service, either way it sucks, perhaps if penalties where introduced things might change - no service no money (pipe dream) they have a bit of work to do right now, i have to reset my modem up to 5 times 5 times every day now to get a decent connection and that's when it is working, serious problems that seam to be getting worse.

Having used customer service in the USA, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand, I can't say Thailand is especially bad. Perhaps having lived and worked in many different countries, I naturally deal with them in a way that helps things along or maybe I've been particularly lucky. All I know is that every time I have needed to call TOT customer service, I've got what I wanted and quickly. There is one exception to this: when TOT's big pipe was allegedly broken by accident a few weeks ago, I couldn't get through on their phone, but that's not in the least bit surprising. My experience with customer service has been similar with almost every enterprise here. They have only been weak in the same areas that customer service is weak in the same industries in other countries - IN MY EXPERIENCE. Ever dealt with Yahoo Hosting customer service? Now THAT's a company that really misses the point.

Those are just my experiences. Product may, as it says in the fine print, differ from that shown in the pictures.

Do you know why you have to keep resetting your modem? Is it USB or ethernet? What brand/model? Are you running P2P applications?

I run 3 ADSL lines with 3 different ISPs in Thailand across 4 different routers and rarely have to reset three of those. The only one I have to reset is the cheap garbage Chinese router I got free from TOT because the IP tables gets clogged up by torrenting. I only got what I paid for. If I bothered to buy a better router, I would probably almost never have to reset it.

[nickbkk]

Same thing has happened today - 3rd November. No international access. Have only just been able to get to Thaivisa at 3:30 am (4th Nov).

This is getting beyond a joke.

This smells to me like something a bit more than simple TOT bandwidth issues. I've been online a lot lately without noticing any total outage in international bandwidth. If you can't even see ThaiVisa.com, I think you might have a problem elsewhere.

Just my suspicion. I could well be wrong.

How do you know you don't have international access? Do you lose Yahoo/MSN, too? Are DNS queries being resolved? Can you still get Google.com? The next time you think int'l bandwidth has effectively dropped to zero, try this simple test:

1. Test http://www.google.com/

2. Test http://64.233.187.99/

If 2 works but 1 does not, you have a DNS problem.

[mokwit]

It seems you can use the internet so long as you stay in Thailand. Downmloading of anything is strictly forbidden as TRUE might have to pay more for bandwidth of people were allowed to actually use the internet.

I downlaod stock market data from Yahoo. It stopped working on 25/10. If I use CSLoxinfo 56K it works (but it is not as simple as dumping TRUE for them) . Seems that TRUE have somehow blocked my ability to do this after 2 or more years - similar perhaps to the stunts they pull with bittorrent apparently.

There are periods of difficulty accessing high volume sites such as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo. I suspect this is because they run it through their invisible proxy to see if it can be fetched locally (yeah right, we all get exactly the same emails). I suspect they are trying to code WAAAAYYYYYY beyond their skill level, hence the problems.

An alternative explanation is theri DNS lookup is screwed up - they are known incompetents in this area.

I have previously had problems caused by packet loss (i.e them discarding the packets to protect their bandwidth)

Can anybody shed any light on whether this is incompetence or deliberate attempts to close off data downlaoding- and more importantly how I can get service restored/work around this.

[JetsetBkk]

Same thing has happened today - 3rd November. No international access. Have only just been able to get to Thaivisa at 3:30 am (4th Nov).

This is getting beyond a joke.

This smells to me like something a bit more than simple TOT bandwidth issues. I've been online a lot lately without noticing any total outage in international bandwidth. If you can't even see ThaiVisa.com, I think you might have a problem elsewhere.

Just my suspicion. I could well be wrong.

How do you know you don't have international access? Do you lose Yahoo/MSN, too? Are DNS queries being resolved? Can you still get Google.com? The next time you think int'l bandwidth has effectively dropped to zero, try this simple test:

1. Test http://www.google.com/

2. Test http://64.233.187.99/

If 2 works but 1 does not, you have a DNS problem.

Now, Sunday 4th @ 4pm, access to Thaivisa is perfect, email is OK too. Haven't tested torrent downloading.

The usual symptoms I have are:

cannot access Hotmail using Outlook Express, but can access Gmail - again using OE

cannot access Thaivisa

cannot access Speedtest.net to see which servers I can access.

Phuket Gazette is always OK

www.Google.com is usually OK (actually, I use a bookmark to '72.14.205.104' instead of 'Google.com' to avoid DNS problems).

I just noticed that my DNS servers are the default Maxnet ones: 203.121.130.39/42.

I've just changed the alternate one to be 208.67.222.222 - one of the OpenDNS servers. I used to use both the OpenDNS servers all the time - can't remember why I changed back to the Maxnet ones.

But the weird things is, torrents were coming down at an incredible rate yesterday, even though I had this other problem - so maybe ToT/Maxnet are screwing around with their DNS servers.

[onethailand]

"Bandwidth in Thailand has sucked miserably for ages" Huh? Thailand actually has some pretty dam_n impressive domestic internet infrastructure.

It still sucks. It was much worse between 1994-1997. The bandwidth available to Thailand is a pittance compared with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Furthermore, most of Laos and Cambodia's bandwidth come from Thailand.

Domestically, it's superb. You can thank NECTEC and Internet Thailand for that too.

Internationally, it sucks - thank the CAT for that. It's sufficient, just barely.

4. You really think so many people in Thailand are browsing The Nation and the Bangkok Post websites that Thailand's international bandwidth is being hit? Please....

Read more closely. I said that the Post was located overseas many moons ago. They have no good reason to move back.

And yes - access in and out of Thailand can be affected by demand for news, whether we're talking The Nation (in Thailand) or the Post (outside Thailand). The tsunami proved that very effectively - and in fact this event also overwhelmed a lot of domestic servers who simply had poor domestic connections as well.

5. There has never been enough bandwidth here to satisfy demand? Please direct me to this mythical land where there IS enough bandwidth to satisfy demand.

Reasonable demand. But if you really want to get picky, Japan and Korea have more than enough to supply demand for access to international websites.

Edited November 4, 2007 by onethailand