What's Up With Thailand's Woeful Internet

[virtualtraveller]

Man, I could complain every week about the hopeless internet service in this country! Compared to the UK where you get reliable broadband (4mb standard) AND cable TV AND free local calls for about £18 (under 1000 baht), whereas here I pay 1600 baht for bad Cable (UBC), another 2000 baht for an almost reliable (1mb min.) business package and still pay for local calls.

In fact, since I run an internet business from home I've resorted to using two ISPs, Maxnet's 3mb/2000 baht business package, and also TOTs home 4mb shared/800 baht package on a separate line, switching between the two using wifi. Neither give more than 80% up-time. In the evenings TOT slows to about 70kb, during the day both run to 3mb, but often they time out when I access some sites. The speedtest shows a fast download, but the averate time for a page to load is 2-3 secs.

Bizarrely, sometimes the internet radio streams fine, and skype conversations are possible but I cannot access websites (ie via the international gateway). Something is definitely up, and I suspect CAT are fiddling with the whole setup.

Here's the thing, this past week both services have been going down, it's not about the speed, it just dies, or goes up and down like a yo-yo, so a page might half load then stop. No way to do business for sure. Worst of all, accessing https (secure) sites is abyssmal, usually it takes up to 10 secs to load a page, sometimes not at all, and this is a sure sign that some sort of spy software is now installed and everything you ever request via the net is being funnelled through some software slowing things down. It get's particularly slow for https because it can't figure out why it can't 'read' the data, thus holding on to the packet of data longer before sending them on.

THEN, yesterday I got this message bizarrely embedded in the middle of a wordpress admin page;

Sorry, the web site you are accessing has been closed by Royal Thai Police due to inappropriateness such as pornography, gambling or contain any information which is deemed to violate national security.

I refreshed the page, and checked the main site, everything fine. This morning a friend emailed to say that when he tried to reply to an email of mine using webmail, he got the same thing.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

I suspect that the monkeys installing this software haven't quite got it right and are giving the game away with this warning sign popping up in the wrong places.

All the same, I run a business that brings 1 million baht into Thailand every month and employs about 50. THere is no reason why 1000 other SMEs like might can't exist here in Thailand to compete with the Indians, which of course is a billion baht economic boost. Sadly, I have to say that Thailand is not conducive to running an internet business. Even if I budgeted 10k a month for a dedicated line I would still be experiencing the same problems as everyone else since everything seems to channel through the logjam that CAT are creating.

[cdnvic]

Being covered extensively in the technology subforum.