Cat Telecom Union Postpones Cutting Overseas Circuit Until Thursday

[esprit]

If they're the same employees that tell you to restart your computer when your PPPoE is rejecting your password, don't count on it.

I work with Forex and if the internet goes down I'm on the next plane to Singapore or Malaysia.

Not with an e-ticket though

[Spee]

CAT union backs down

KOMSAN TORTERMVASANA

The CAT Telecom union has called off its threat to disconnect the international gateway and suspend international direct dialling, fearing it would paralyse telecommunication services and put businesses with overseas links in chaos.

Come on. Does anyone honestly believe they did it for these reasons? They didn't because someone made a stupid silly bluff. It my business, it's also known as "writing a check the company can't cash."

[zorro1]

I read somewhere that the discontinuation of Internet services in any western country would cause that country's economy to collapse within 48 hours. I wonder how long it would take to cause Thailands economy to collapse.

Given the high quality service levels, would anyone notice for a few days?

[h90]

CAT union backs down

KOMSAN TORTERMVASANA

The CAT Telecom union has called off its threat to disconnect the international gateway and suspend international direct dialling, fearing it would paralyse telecommunication services and put businesses with overseas links in chaos.

Come on. Does anyone honestly believe they did it for these reasons? They didn't because someone made a stupid silly bluff. It my business, it's also known as "writing a check the company can't cash."

seems you are right

[hammered]

It seems like the little action at the port may be more effective than this one anyway. Post claims 5000 containers affected yesterday and initial 10 million baht loss for the port after a thousand worker strike.

[h90]

It seems like the little action at the port may be more effective than this one anyway. Post claims 5000 containers affected yesterday and initial 10 million baht loss for the port after a thousand worker strike.

But it is nonsense today railway, tomorrow airports, than airports and railways working again and ports strike.....

They should do it at the same day....

[hammered]

It seems like the little action at the port may be more effective than this one anyway. Post claims 5000 containers affected yesterday and initial 10 million baht loss for the port after a thousand worker strike.

But it is nonsense today railway, tomorrow airports, than airports and railways working again and ports strike.....

They should do it at the same day....

I think technically it is illegal for most state enterpise workers to strike so they usually sick-out. They have two days self certified sick leave before needign a doctors note which limits action unless they want to go all out.

See how it plays out but if Samak doesnt resign in a day or two it could get a lot more serios. The shippers at the port reckoned that a strike could lose up to 4 billion baht per day, which is not insubstantial.

A politcal way out of this is needed and needed now. Sadly it seem in parliamnet nobody want to talk just to posture. If the elected representatives care so little about the country what hope is there.

[dkstoney]

Don't forget that there is no redundency in the Thailand communications services with regard to international connections as all paths lead to a single gateway that can, in fact, be shut off. It's one of the reasons overseas-hosted websites are sometimes hit and miss--data bottleneck.

[animatic]

Don't forget that there is no redundency in the Thailand communications services with regard to international connections as all paths lead to a single gateway that can, in fact, be shut off. It's one of the reasons overseas-hosted websites are sometimes hit and miss--data bottleneck.

One reason 'fast lines' in Thailand run so slow is the lack of redundancy in the connection to the main internet.

I have been told by two ISP's that it was both from CAT being too cheap,

and from some under-informed minister being told he would have more control of porn and dissent,

so he wrote an order to limit it to one trunk main connection.

The whole shooting match is about 1/5th of what is needed,

but deemed NOW as a bit too pricey to implement

No one at the time considered the explosion of internet gaming at cafe's here

that has clogged the lines big time. So yes they could close it down with 2-3 people

in pretty short order. But the right knowlegable person with 2-3 armed associates

could ALSO start it up again.

I suspect this was clearly threatened,

but with the announced added level of censorship...

Edited September 4, 2008 by animatic

[wintermute]

I've never found the quality of the internet to be a serious problem here. Well, the past week has been crap but that's been the rare exception from almost 2 years of me using the same home dsl connection and things have returned to normal. If you guys are bitching about internet here you should see how it's regulated and gigabyte capped in places like Australia. It's far worse over there.

[wasabi]

This would be an incredibly short sighted naive thing to do. It probably would not make Samak exit but would cause billions and billions of dollars in loses for business both domestic and internationally related to Thailand. The PAD seem to be doing everything they can to make sure Thailand loses it's claim as a developing country to firmly being entrenched in third world status.

[Spee]

One reason 'fast lines' in Thailand run so slow is the lack of redundancy in the connection to the main internet.

I have been told by two ISP's that it was both from CAT being too cheap,

and from some under-informed minister being told he would have more control of porn and dissent,

so he wrote an order to limit it to one trunk main connection.

These are apples and oranges statements and don't really make much sense.

No one at the time considered the explosion of internet gaming at cafe's here

that has clogged the lines big time.

Hate to burst your bubble, but internet cafe's are at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to network throughput and performance. If internet cafe' traffic has "clogged the lines big time" then whoever is running the network is incompetent.

Network operators do what it called "traffic shaping" which if done properly results in prioritized traffic. Telephony is typically top priority (often in hierarchy for military, government, businesses, then residential). Then there is real-time video, such as a video conference. Then there is the high priority traffic which people pay extra money for. Etc., etc., etc. Finally, way down at the bottom of the list are the internet cafe's.

[ulath]

I read somewhere that the discontinuation of Internet services in any western country would cause that country's economy to collapse within 48 hours.

I don't know where you may have read this, but it is pretty nonsensical.

There might be disruptions, of which the most recent catastrophic type would have been nine-eleven. But a discontinuation is all but impossible, given that the networks are heavily meshed (i.e., alternate paths) and built of highly redundant, high availabilty technology. It is common practice for these kinds of businesses to have multiple voice and internet access points with more than one provider.

The only way someone might have any sort of chance of doing this would be simultaneous attacks on all major undersea fiber routes. But these are heavily guarded, if not inaccessible. Even if this were to occur, mission critical traffic would still be routed through other redundant system. There might be a lot of outages, packet loss, latency, etc.

Even though I agree with you that 48hours is nonsensical.

This happend last year http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/02/06/1431206.shtml in the middle east.

Also before the southern cross cable was finished in 2000 Australia had major problems from the sea cable being cut.

Which makes Australia better able to cop with cable cuts as it has a dual cables which are in ring formation.

There was a major slow down though when one of these was damaged a couple of years ago.

[Lannig]

I read somewhere that the discontinuation of Internet services in any western country would cause that country's economy to collapse within 48 hours.

I don't know where you may have read this, but it is pretty nonsensical.

There might be disruptions, of which the most recent catastrophic type would have been nine-eleven. But a discontinuation is all but impossible, given that the networks are heavily meshed (i.e., alternate paths) and built of highly redundant, high availabilty technology. It is common practice for these kinds of businesses to have multiple voice and internet access points with more than one provider.

The only way someone might have any sort of chance of doing this would be simultaneous attacks on all major undersea fiber routes. But these are heavily guarded, if not inaccessible. Even if this were to occur, mission critical traffic would still be routed through other redundant system. There might be a lot of outages, packet loss, latency, etc.

In any case, the economy wouldn't collapse because of it, and certainly not within 48 hours.

I wonder how long it would take to cause Thailands economy to collapse.

If there is indeed only a single internet and telephony gateway for the entire country, via CAT, this would appear to be a very serious problem (aka single point failure). Fortunately, the problem could easily be alleviated by opening up the market to more suppliers.

I used to work in the engineering for one of the top 3 Internet service providers in Thailand (don't shoot me, I've tried doing my best with the staff and equipment I could have).

The situation there is very unusual: EVERYTHING runs through CAT. Even companies buying bandwidth from foreign international backbone providers (Sprint etc.) HAVE to run the fibers these through the CAT building because there is a monopoly. The laws make it so difficult and expensive to buy bandwidth from non-CAT foreign providers that except for the very premium customers, all the traffic goes through the CAT international exchange anyway.

So yes, I can perfectly imagine a scenario in which a bunch of PAD unionists break into operations rooms (don't think it would be hard anyway) and turn off equipment or unplug a bunch of fiber optics. That would effectively make most if not all of international Internet connections impossible in the whole country. And certainly for all individual ISP customers this would mean a complete blackout.

And don't tell me about security at CAT. During a massive break-in that happened while I was working at that ISP, I was called to help track down intruders and found out that a core network router at CAT was being used for a staging attack. I soon found out that the top-of-the-line Cisco router costing millions of bahts had the super-user password set as ... 'cisco' (the installation default).

[Spee]

So yes, I can perfectly imagine a scenario in which a bunch of PAD unionists break into operations rooms (don't think it would be hard anyway) and turn off equipment or unplug a bunch of fiber optics.

......

And don't tell me about security at CAT. .... I soon found out that the top-of-the-line Cisco router costing millions of bahts had the super-user password set as ... 'cisco' (the installation default).

Scary stuff. Almost like a train wreck. You don't really want to see one, but you can't look away either.

I assume you reported these problems to your superiors, in protection of their business.

My limited understanding of submarine cable networks indicates they are owned by various consortiums, and CAT is a member of the consortium that owns the undersea cable that comes to Thailand. One would think businesses could appeal to other members of the consortium to talk some sense into the CAT leadership.

Now from all this I've gone and gotten more interested. (done my share of work on carrier telecom backbones and fiber optics is of serious interest):

From a short bit of research, it appears that CAT belongs to consortia for approximately 8 or 9 submarine fiber cables. The landing points are in Songkhla, Phetchaburi, Satun and Sri Racha. Apparently several of these cables were damaged during the 2006 Taiwan earthquake, which has resulted in some performance problems. However, there are other cables going west towards the Middle East and Europe as well as south to Malaysia and Singapore.

Now my curiosity is peaked about the transmission links between these landing points and the network hub which appears to be in BKK. The same goes for the level of redundancy in the CAT network backbone. A typical carrier backbone is partially meshed for redundant, high availability paths. Makes me wonder what the CAT backbone architecture looks like (edit: found it, see link below).

Interestingly, I came across an article stating that a new start-up company has approval for and is investing in a new submarine cable. Let's hope there is more of this entrepreneurial activity on the horizon.

http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article-sout...?parentid=96430

Also interestingly, I came across this website which has a tremendous amount of interesting information, if there are any other telcom egg-heads out there.

http://internet.nectec.or.th/webstats/home.iir?Sec=home

My feelings on this still go back to the other thread about the chances for strikes in all these state owned enterprises. I'll repeat what I said there. The government should be in the business of governing, not in the business of running businesses. I seriously doubt there would be these kinds of problems and shutdown threats if these activities were being run by for-profit public or private businesses. They are more interested in providing service and making money for their stockholders, as opposed to making threats that may or may not impact one government squabble or another.

[Spee]

No one at the time considered the explosion of internet gaming at cafe's here

that has clogged the lines big time.

Hate to burst your bubble, but internet cafe's are at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to network throughput and performance. If internet cafe' traffic has "clogged the lines big time" then whoever is running the network is incompetent.

Network operators do what it called "traffic shaping" which if done properly results in prioritized traffic. Telephony is typically top priority (often in hierarchy for military, government, businesses, then residential). Then there is real-time video, such as a video conference. Then there is the high priority traffic which people pay extra money for. Etc., etc., etc. Finally, way down at the bottom of the list are the internet cafe's.

Found a news article from 2006 indicating at that time, CAT's revenue was divided as follows:

36% international calling

33% concession fees

23% data/internet

7% radio/mobile phones

[visionquesthai]

But wouldn't that solve the problem of all those kids playing all those horrible computer games? Wouldn't it also solve the problem of having to block all those (400 I read the other day) web sites that contain anti anything-about-thailand information!?

and what about THIS one???

[Payboy]

Well its almost 10am Thursday and the interweb works as normal.... all hype and bullsh*t

guess cat's call for the log-off sequence has been routed to tech-support in india.....

[ThaiAdventure]

Full PDF here:

Characteristics of Internet Traffic in Thailand

This section summarizes the main findings and

discusses their implications.

(1) As expected, Internet traffic exhibits strong daily

and weekly periodicities. This suggests predictability of the

traffic data. One can always expect a higher transfer rate

when using Internet on weekends or during midnight-6am

on weekdays. As a result, large file transfers or bulk

transactions should be planned during these periods.

(2) Volume of Internet traffic coming from abroad is

larger than that leaving Thailand. This suggests traffic deficit

with foreign ISPs. As a result, Thai ISPs will be at

disadvantage when dealing with overseas peering

agreements.

(3) Domestic bandwidth usage is low. Only 10% of

capacity deployed by ISPs is used daily. Although such

usage level is considered normal for large Internet backbones

in the U.S. [9], it may not be appropriate for Thai

networks. On a pessimistic side, such low utilization level

could mean that there is a low demand for local Internet

contents, or there are not enough interesting local contents

available. Both reasons could worsen the degree of overseas

traffic deficit mentioned above. On an optimistic side, light

utilization is partially a reflection of the high growth rate. A

low utilization level may signal an era of competition and

overcapacity. It is speculated that such over-provisioning

situation is driven by the desire for low transaction latency

more than the desire for actual data transfer [9].

(4) Deployment of international capacity is slower than

that of domestic capacity while international traffic demand

grows faster than domestic traffic demand. This is due to

following reasons. Currently, there are many limitations to

ISP's deployment of international capacity. Firstly,

regulations require that ISPs obtain international bandwidth

through a state-owned enterprise. In other words, they

cannot peer with their overseas counterpart directly.

Secondly, the declining value of the Thai Baht after the 1997

crisis puts Thailand at a disadvantage position for

international bandwidth trade. Both reasons amount to high

cost of provisioning new international capacity.

As for why traffic demand grows faster for international

traffic than domestic traffic, this could be attributed to the

user's insatiable demand for international contents. This, in

turns, implies that international bandwidth is essentially

driven by the desire for actual network usage, as oppose to

the desire for low transaction latency as seen in domestic

traffic.

(5) Fast Internet growth rate found in Thailand implies

that careful capacity planning is no longer possible. Even a

rate of traffic doubling each year is considered disruptive for

network operators, let alone the 4x growth [9]. The growth

of Internet in Thailand is not likely to be smooth or

predictable. Thus, simplicity should be the key to network

engineering. Over-provisioning might be the way to go since

it can reduce the overhead cost for putting in more

bandwidth every so often.

I bet the international traffic is bit torrent

Edited September 4, 2008 by ThaiAdventure

[onethailand]

Nectec usually does a good job on Internet research as they were the founding fathers, along with the ISP which became Inet-TH. This report is no exception - however it is already outdated because some of the rules, such as exchange of international traffic, no longer apply. Some of the concepts do still hold true though.

Some ISPs now have their own international gateways so any discussion of a single international gateway is irrelevant. CAT *is* the biggest international gateway and serves more ISPs, however. True is the next largest, and I believe CS-Loxinfo is the third largest international gateway.

The latest Internet map is here: http://internet.nectec.or.th/webstats/down...ap.iir?Sec=home

Also, Internet cafes are not necessarily the bottom of the chain - home users are. Cafes use the same types of connections that home users do, although sometimes they may be higher speed, and sometimes they may be commercial-grade (less contention).

[tropo]

The statement was made that if Internet services were discontinued (in a Western country) the economy would soon callapse. I believe this would be true.

I understood the claim perfectly. It is nonsensical.

You definitely missed the point again. Go back and try again. As the self appointed expert on Internet services one would think you'd have a clue.

Edited September 4, 2008 by tropo

[ando]

I would imagine any companies and individuals who suffer a financial loss as a result of illegal strikes by the unions would be entitled to damages in a civil court.

[Spee]

The statement was made that if Internet services were discontinued (in a Western country) the economy would soon callapse. I believe this would be true.

I understood the claim perfectly. It is nonsensical.

You definitely missed the point again. Go back and try again. As the self appointed expert on Internet services one would think you'd have a clue.

Hey pal, I never claimed to be an expert on everything. I am more knowledgeable than most, but certainly a lot less than many others.

With respect to the specific thread claim, today I saw an interesting program on the US Federal Reserve on the History Channel. One of the Fed staff interviewed stated that the Fed is heavily dependent upon electronic communications and transactions. His viewpoint was that a major failure such as a disruption in service would certainly cause a lot of problems but would not result in collapse. Interestingly, the Fed says that America remains a world leader in processing business transactions via paper check. For its part, that aspect of American commerce would be business as usual in a disaster scenario.

Regardless, the chances of are infinitesimal. Disaster recovery is a mainstream business these days. Should Wall Street be destroyed tomorrow, many businesses would be up and running at their backup locations within a few days. The American carrier networks are heavily meshed, including the original Darpa backbone. The emerging internet technologies like Internet2, Web2.0, IPv6, etc., along with multiple redundant hardware infrastructures make service discontinuity a highly remote probability. If anything, aside from unsecured network hardware, the real "Achilles'heel" in modern networks is the amount of poorly written production software in use.

Even after doing the research last night, I doubt that CAT Telecom could have been brought down by a few people pulling plugs in one or two isolated locations.

[Spee]

Full PDF here:

Characteristics of Internet Traffic in Thailand

It's a well written and very informative paper, albeit about 2 years old with the information probably being older than that. Two or three years in IT is like two or three decades in people-years.

[astral]

It is Friday now.

Did they pull the plug, or back off on the threat?

[Jale]

Since last night, USA based servers (Yahoo, Yahoo mail Google, and many others) are very hard to reach, enormous latency times, many lost packets. Is it Maxnet or is it???? Seems worse than usual (which isn't good to start with)

Any similar experience out there?

[gk10002000]

The statement was made that if Internet services were discontinued (in a Western country) the economy would soon callapse. I believe this would be true.

I understood the claim perfectly. It is nonsensical. I could write paragraphs and pages to explain why, but what's the point? To make such a claim is only indicative of how far out of the depths of understanding you seem to be. Ignorance is bliss, as some people say.

Well, you may write pages, but you would be wrong about how difficult it would be to cut the service off in Thailand. That country does not have multiple access points to the internet as many large countries do. As an example, IRAQ had one before the recent invasion. North Korea has a few, but none that are available to outsiders.

Thailand telecom is very tightly controlled. They do not have multiple satellite uplink/downlink sites. The undersea cables are routed to very few "choke" points with internet drops.

[skiman1]

I would imagine any companies and individuals who suffer a financial loss as a result of illegal strikes by the unions would be entitled to damages in a civil court.

we are in Thailand

[Bard]

I read somewhere that the discontinuation of Internet services in any western country would cause that country's economy to collapse within 48 hours.

It is common practice for these kinds of businesses to have multiple voice and internet access points with more than one provider.

The only way someone might have any sort of chance of doing this would be simultaneous attacks on all major undersea fiber routes. But these are heavily guarded, if not inaccessible. Even if this were to occur, mission critical traffic would still be routed through other redundant system. There might be a lot of outages, packet loss, latency, etc.

The single point provider of international phone lines and internet is provided by CAT, if they shut down any company who does not run there business over sattelite via privately owned network such as Chevron will be without internet and telecommunication out of Thailand.

Since Thailand is a major exporter of goods, and no money transfers into the country is possible the economy will collapse very fast. 48 hours if that...

[Lannig]

Nectec usually does a good job on Internet research as they were the founding fathers, along with the ISP which became Inet-TH. This report is no exception - however it is already outdated because some of the rules, such as exchange of international traffic, no longer apply. Some of the concepts do still hold true though.

Some ISPs now have their own international gateways so any discussion of a single international gateway is irrelevant.

No Sir, to the very best of my knowledge it is *not*.

As already explained in my previous post, they may have their own bandwidth with international providers but the physical "pipes", the fiber optics, *do* run through the CAT facilitie(s) (they may have more than the one in the building on the Chao Praya bank now, I don't know) because of the monopoly.

CAT *is* the biggest international gateway and serves more ISPs, however. True is the next largest, and I believe CS-Loxinfo is the third largest international gateway.

I know for sure that fibers run from their Suah Pah building to the CAT building.

The latest Internet map is here: http://internet.nectec.or.th/webstats/down...ap.iir?Sec=home

Also, Internet cafes are not necessarily the bottom of the chain - home users are. Cafes use the same types of connections that home users do, although sometimes they may be higher speed, and sometimes they may be commercial-grade (less contention).

Wow, you must go to the expensive ones. All the ones I've been using were using lowly home user ADSL links.