I have never had to have GRPS or edge turned on..

You do of course have to have the settings in the phone.. For which AIS can send you a configuration SMS for the commonly used phones.. Maybe thats what happened.

No, that's not what happened. They said they needed to activate it, and they did something at their end and after that it worked. No configuration at my end.

Niece had same experience with EDGE and DTAC.

So sometimes one does have to activate these services.

As mentioned both SIM cards are many years old, maybe the newer ones have it already on???

If your getting another Nokia 3120 make sure its the 3120 Classic. You can check this link: http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_3120_classic-2240.php

will do, thanks for the tip

The new Dtac and AIS SIM cards are activated when purchased. My wife's old Dtac card was not activated and she had to call Dtac. I would guess that AIS is a similar thing.

I am nowhere near any transmission tower, and I am fairly sure I am the only person with a computer in not only my village but for several around. Nearest towns of any size at all are 30 and 50 km awqay respectively.

Out of curiosity, can you get ADSL at the town 30km away? That is right at the limit of what you could pull off with a pair of parabolic dishes and a terrestrial wireless link. The curvature of the earth is really creating issues for you at that point. You'd probably be down in the 1 Mbit range and could have some issues when it rains, (plus it is illegal, but in my experience nobody cares).

The way it works is you rent a floor of a townhouse somewhere in town that has a land line and can get ADSL, get a pair of wireless bridges, and some satellite dish antennas. Most of the C Band satellite dishes will work for 2.4 GHz wireless, even though they weren't really designed for it. You'll have to mount the dishes on a tower, and they will look rather funny pointing at the ground, but most people really have no clue what it is for anyway. They'll think the wind just blew over your satellite dish.

The antennas will need to be mounted a minimum of 12 meters above the ground, but 20 would be better if you can swing it.

Alternatively, you if you have a relative living halfway in between where you can set up a relay station your life gets much easier. You could get away with much less conspicuous Yagi antennas then, and they wouldn't have to be mounted so high. Signal strength would be better also.

You'll probably spend at least 60k - 80k to pull this off, and getting them pointed correctly without a spectrum analyzer can be a real chore, but if you're really stuck it is phyically possible.