Aag Cable To Boost Asia’s Internet Capacity In August

[george]

AAG cable to boost Asia’s internet capacity in August

Exclusive Thaivisa.com News

By John Le Fevre

Good news for Thailand's internet users. AAG -

Asia-America Gateway comes into operation

in August 2009.

BANGKOK (thaivisa.com): -- In just a few weeks internet users throughout Asia should start to see a dramatic increase in internet speed for websites located outside of the region when the $US550 million Asia-America Gateway (AAG) comes into operation.

The new 20,000km (about 12,400 miles) AAG - an optical fibre cable network stretching from Malaysia to the West Coast of America via Guam and Hawaii - is due to commence operating in August.

The cable has additional landing points in Hong Kong and the Philippines, with branches to Singapore, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam.

The proposed cable became a reality in June 2006, when AiTi of Brunei Darussalam, CAT Telecom (Thailand), PLDT (Philippines), REACH (Hong Kong), StarHub (Singapore), Telekom Malaysia (Malaysia) and VNPT (Vietnam) all signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) for its construction.

In addition to being one of the longest undersea cable rollouts in history, the AAG will actually shorten the route for data from Asia to America, avoiding some of the wolds’ areas most prone to seismic activity in the process.

The demand for better quality communications services throughout Asia has been an ongoing battle between foreign and local businesses and regional communications carriers, and one that has affected economic growth in some countries.

The AAG will will use the latest Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technologies with a minimum design capacity of 1.28 terabit/s and a design capacity of 1.92 terabit/s.

The last of the undersea cable work was completed in June and all 10 landing points were completed months ago.

The new cable will improve e-commerce traffic and help meet the increasing demand for faster and more reliable internet, video and other multimedia services and applications.

-- thaivisa.com 2009-07-24

Related link:

Test your broadband speed against Thaivisa.com Servers in Singapore.

[beano2274]

Great news, but have CAT upgraded their Equipment yet?

And how about the links from TOT to CAT, what is the capacity now, and what will the future capacity be?

Cannot see it doing much unless the equipment is in place and the interconnects are upgraded as well.

[LawnGnome]

If it still goes through the CAT bottleneck, it won't matter much, in the end...

[webfact]

Nothing will change if it not bypass CAT gateway. And I strongly doubt it will!

[isaanbrit]

This sounds like another april fool - its definately not 1st April - is it ????

lol

[Pui]

It would be lovely to have fast interest here. I work and derive my entire income online.

We have the 8mb service from True. It was good for the first month and now its slower than the old 1mb. Called the engineers out and they showed that with in Thailand it was 8mb with a local true speed test. What it should have said was “8mb internet with Thailand only”. Perhaps I should have read the small print. Me bad.

Last week in Hong Kong airport I logged on to the free throughout-the-airport internet service and it was incredible. I did the work that takes me 3 hours in Thailand in no more than 10 minutes.

Over there I waited 1 – 2 seconds for a web page. Here I wait 30 seconds.

Bring on the fast internet.

Does anyone know of any better services than “True 8mb”

(which is certainly not True in the sense of the word)

[stumonster]

can I get symmetrical ?

[sillyfools]

I don't really think it will be a significant speed improvement as it is claimed because dinosaur providers such as TOT hardly use the CAT-IIG. They want to save costs and get most of their bandwidth from TM. They will tap into it over there probably.

The reason why I state it is that overall speeds to the USA are very reasonable but speeds and connectivity to EUROPE is a complete DISASTER. Instead of adding more and more bandwidth to the USA it would make more sense to double the bandwidth to Europe instead.

That in itself will increase the speed to the USA as well as now 70% of all traffic to Europe is passing through the USA which makes it enormeously slow. Think of 500 ms instead of 200ms.

It would also be good to instead have a few technicians who at least know the basics of routing data around the world.

Often packets destined for the USA traverse the European backbone, while packets for Europe pass through the US. Absolutely ridiculous. I have sent them already many emails about it but as with everything in the CAT and TOT dinosaur companies... nothing happens and not even a reply is sent back even though the emails have a delivery report.

Must have some real geniuses working over there.....

[hansnl]

Nothing will change if it not bypass CAT gateway. And I strongly doubt it will!

And the filters from the watchdog?

[BlackJack]

well with the number of people leaving the country and with toursim down to its lowest point and with the new cable maybe maybe maybe we just might see a few K more

hold your breath NOW

[robertsonmartin]

Will Thailand Telecom companies buy any bandwidth? Somehow I doubt this and we will have to struggle on with what we already have.

[webfact]

Nothing will change if it not bypass CAT gateway. And I strongly doubt it will!

And the filters from the watchdog?

of course... forgot to mention it...

[jb5music]

Yay!

[kharashima]

It would be lovely to have fast interest here. I work and derive my entire income online.

We have the 8mb service from True. It was good for the first month and now its slower than the old 1mb. Called the engineers out and they showed that with in Thailand it was 8mb with a local true speed test. What it should have said was “8mb internet with Thailand only”. Perhaps I should have read the small print. Me bad.

Last week in Hong Kong airport I logged on to the free throughout-the-airport internet service and it was incredible. I did the work that takes me 3 hours in Thailand in no more than 10 minutes.

Over there I waited 1 – 2 seconds for a web page. Here I wait 30 seconds.

Bring on the fast internet.

Does anyone know of any better services than “True 8mb”

(which is certainly not True in the sense of the word)

[scratt]

Just wait for the price increases later this year when they charge us for their "service improvements".

(Loosely translated as now providing something like the speeds they have been charging for for the last 5 years, but not actually supplying.)

And banks will probably slap yet another surcharge on ATMs for foreign card transactions because they are now "faster... bla bla"

etc. etc. etc.

Edited July 24, 2009 by scratt

[dttk0009]

The line will probably be reserved for larger corporations and high so privileged internet connections. I doubt the regular True or Maxnet user will see an increase in speed or reliability.

[Able]

Good news that another company comes into the market.

Maybe ...... just maybe........ things will pick up

Personaly my internet service with maxnet over the last couple of years has been 'ok to bad' and changes on literally a daily basis most of the time. (I try all the tricks suggested by the guys in the know on these forums ... thats a big help)

Another competitor is ususly good news.

[webfact]

"a small step for man, a big step for mankind"

...wrong thread

[henryalleman]

It would be lovely to have fast interest here. I work and derive my entire income online.

We have the 8mb service from True. It was good for the first month and now its slower than the old 1mb. Called the engineers out and they showed that with in Thailand it was 8mb with a local true speed test. What it should have said was "8mb internet with Thailand only". Perhaps I should have read the small print. Me bad.

Last week in Hong Kong airport I logged on to the free throughout-the-airport internet service and it was incredible. I did the work that takes me 3 hours in Thailand in no more than 10 minutes.

Over there I waited 1 – 2 seconds for a web page. Here I wait 30 seconds.

Bring on the fast internet.

Does anyone know of any better services than "True 8mb"

(which is certainly not True in the sense of the word)

I don't know where you live, but here in the Chaeng Wattana area my speed with True is never lower than 7 MB international. Evendo it would be nice to have an higer speed, because lifestream is not really perfect, back home I had 16 MB and for a price lower than 8MB in Thailand.

PS I have the TRUE 8MB and GOLD package.

[Jeii3000]

Whatever!!!!

[LostInBKK]

None of it matters with the commies filtering/monitoring everything.... Oh wait, this isn't China??

Edited July 24, 2009 by LostInBKK

[dttk0009]

It would be lovely to have fast interest here. I work and derive my entire income online.

We have the 8mb service from True. It was good for the first month and now its slower than the old 1mb. Called the engineers out and they showed that with in Thailand it was 8mb with a local true speed test. What it should have said was "8mb internet with Thailand only". Perhaps I should have read the small print. Me bad.

Last week in Hong Kong airport I logged on to the free throughout-the-airport internet service and it was incredible. I did the work that takes me 3 hours in Thailand in no more than 10 minutes.

Over there I waited 1 – 2 seconds for a web page. Here I wait 30 seconds.

Bring on the fast internet.

Does anyone know of any better services than "True 8mb"

(which is certainly not True in the sense of the word)

I don't know where you live, but here in the Chaeng Wattana area my speed with True is never lower than 7 MB international. Evendo it would be nice to have an higer speed, because lifestream is not really perfect, back home I had 16 MB and for a price lower than 8MB in Thailand.

PS I have the TRUE 8MB and GOLD package.

A friend of mine who lives in the same area as you also has blazing fast internet from True. You guys most likely share the same bandwidth, and since there's far less users in Nonthaburi than downtown, it's far less congested. Downtown internet is very unreliable and most of the time it's slow. The only consistency lies in the torrents. I haven't gotten under my promoted speed torrent-wise in years.

Edited July 24, 2009 by dttk0009

[mouse]

The solution, if you really must have speed, is to get a 1MB Fiber Optic line dedicated to you. It costs a lot per month (15.000 Baht/mo) but it is worth it.

This is what you get during the busy time of the day when testing Seattle from here. Other times usually come out at 5-10MB/sec down and 1MB/sec up;

[flyfrog]

Great news, but have CAT upgraded their Equipment yet?

And how about the links from TOT to CAT, what is the capacity now, and what will the future capacity be?

Cannot see it doing much unless the equipment is in place and the interconnects are upgraded as well.

I am wondering how much they gonna charge us here in Thailand?

[enterfromcph]

Guys as long as everything will be the same ... based on the fact it will pass by CAT to make sure it does not say anything that can harm .. you know who.. and you wil see an increase in your brand with out of Thailand

but first we need approval from the webfilters of CAT .. which is increased daily

[Goattee]

Does anyone know of any better services than “True 8mb”

(which is certainly not True in the sense of the word)

CAT does offer retail DSL service in many parts of Bangkok. We ended our True service and went with CAT's 2Mb download service. International bandwidth is dramatically better than anything True ever provided.

I stream TV from the US using a Slingcatcher box in California. It lets me control a DVR and watch shows. Once we switched over to the CAT 2Mb service the streams have become pretty acceptable just about all day. (With True I had to wait for Bangkok to go to sleep before I had acceptable international bandwdith.)

[d0om4gloom]

I don't really think it will be a significant speed improvement as it is claimed because dinosaur providers such as TOT hardly use the CAT-IIG. They want to save costs and get most of their bandwidth from TM. They will tap into it over there probably.

The reason why I state it is that overall speeds to the USA are very reasonable but speeds and connectivity to EUROPE is a complete DISASTER. Instead of adding more and more bandwidth to the USA it would make more sense to double the bandwidth to Europe instead.

That in itself will increase the speed to the USA as well as now 70% of all traffic to Europe is passing through the USA which makes it enormeously slow. Think of 500 ms instead of 200ms.

It would also be good to instead have a few technicians who at least know the basics of routing data around the world.

Often packets destined for the USA traverse the European backbone, while packets for Europe pass through the US. Absolutely ridiculous. I have sent them already many emails about it but as with everything in the CAT and TOT dinosaur companies... nothing happens and not even a reply is sent back even though the emails have a delivery report.

Must have some real geniuses working over there.....

I agree to comments before, CAT to Europe is a disaster. For the last week its been worthless from about 5pm thro 2am. However, the truth is that its not CAT, its their peering partners that provides the international bandwidth.

As for delay, thats really not the issue with most internet applications or indeed if your just browsing. The real problem here is that the international bandwidth to Europe is so full that severe packet loss occurs. Packets are dropped because the router interface queues on the international links are so full they overflow. Your browser sits waiting for a TCP ack which never arrives. Eventually it retries but if you loose the retry your waiting even longer until eventually the whole connection fails. I actually build international backbone for a certain ISP (non Thai provider i'm afraid) and have good visability of whats going on.

This new bandwidth to USA will not suddenly be available to everyone but if we're lucky it may relieve some of the pressure on us all. Potentially better routing to west coast USA might relieve relieve pressure in the Europe direction if some of the ISPs introduce the new route in their networks where they might not have one today. However, be aware that the vast majority of the bandwidth will actually be used in providing private networks, corporate connections etc. Only a small amount will ultimately get carved out for backbone internet connections.

For those that dont understand the difference between Delay and Bandwidth: When you have high delay you can add bandwidth to allow more users to do the same thing but each one of them will never work any faster as the delay remains unchanged. In contrast, when you dont have enough bandwidth, everyone grinds to a halt as the quantity of data cannot be sent over the bandwidth available - hence why if you use the network at 3am when few people are on it you get great service. Note also, most of the ISPs in Thailand have great in-country service, they all have the same international bandwidth problem though - not really surprising given thats the most expensive part to provide.

[Pooklook]

Just wait for the price increases later this year when they charge us for their "service improvements".

(Loosely translated as now providing something like the speeds they have been charging for for the last 5 years, but not actually supplying.)

And banks will probably slap yet another surcharge on ATMs for foreign card transactions because they are now "faster... bla bla"

etc. etc. etc.

Faster Nid Noy..... Same Same but different .......price...

[d0om4gloom]

The solution, if you really must have speed, is to get a 1MB Fiber Optic line dedicated to you. It costs a lot per month (15.000 Baht/mo) but it is worth it.

This is what you get during the busy time of the day when testing Seattle from here. Other times usually come out at 5-10MB/sec down and 1MB/sec up;

As i've just posted, it makes not a jot of difference what 'access' speed you buy into the local ISP unless all your after is Thai/Asia websites.

As for the other poster, no Thailand data is not monitored

[barry]

do fewer tourists visiting thailand

equate into less people on line

ergo faster connect tim?

sorry for the neophyte question but i barely

know a computer chip from a potato chip