Cat Telecom Union Postpones Cutting Overseas Circuit Until Thursday

[Spee]

The single point provider of international phone lines and internet is provided by CAT,

I don't think anyone is disputing this (with perhaps the exception noted in one of my earlier posts).

The question or concern is whether or not country-wide internet & telephony service outage could occur if some lunatic went into a single building and shut down a single system. I would argue this would be extremely doubtful if not impossible. There are almost surely a multitude of physical devices, access points and redundant paths. To shut everything down would require a conscious decision at the very highest levels of the organization and would have to be at multiple points. It's not as simple as something like unplugging one's hair-dryer.

If this were to somehow occur, it would no doubt throw have a significant effect far beyond a short term outage. For someone in CAT to order what would effectively be a business shut-down to serve some political purpose, would basically be providing multiple valid reasons for the monopoly to be dissolved.

As I suggested earlier, whoever made such a threat public was writing a check that CAT can't (or won't) cash.

Edited September 5, 2008 by Spee

[onethailand]

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.

As you know, CAT is responsible for international communications. CAT most likely does control all cable-based communications through their gateways. But they do not have any physical control over satellite-based connections, even if they are entitled to handle these connections.

Also, TOT has its own cables into Malaysia, not under CAT control (even though they are supposed to be). I do not know if any of the other ISPs have their own cables which bypass CAT, but in any case CAT do not have sole control of international communications.

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

Haha. The great majority use the home user links, no question about it, but some still run higher bandwidth than most home users, and a very few are on SME-type links. I owned a cafe a couple years ago - my international link was 4mbps - higher than any other cafe in Bangkok at the time. But it was still essentially a home user ADSL.

[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.

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.

Hey Pal, I'll try to make the point clear for you this time.

The original statement was regarding financial collapse IF ALL international internet services to a Western country were severed for at least 48 hours.

You're arguing that this is nonsense because this could never happen. You're probably right that it never could happen, but whether it could happen or not is totally irrelevant to the prediction of what might occur if it did happen. It was a hypothetical prediction made to emphasize the extent to which western nations are dependent on international internet services.

[rainman]

The single point of failure at CAT scares me.

[ThaiAdventure]

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.

Indeed. But I thought it did point out a very interesting fact that only 10% of local bandwidth was utilised whereas nearly all international bandwidth was swallowed (albeit a couple of years ago, but the trend was clear).

I think the usage demographic still holds true today (been looking for more up to date info but still looking) and IF it is true then according to the following info, investment in the structure has missed the mark a bit by heavily weighting local bandwidth exapnsion over international.

So, yor local access is a fast as it ever was.....and your international access is as slow as it ever was.

Month (Summary) : 2008-08-05 International Bandwidth : 30.071 Gbps

Domestics Bandwidth : 226.06 Gbps

Domain under .TH: 28652 Domains

โดเมนภาษาไทยภายใต้ .TH :7105 Domains

Internet User : 13.416 (Million) Users

[paulandmaneerat]

My internet goes off every time it rains, so what's new?

[HorseDoctor]

As long as SexPats exist, no worries on the Thai economy.