Internet Blocks In Thailand

[manarak]

I read some stuff here and there about internet quirks in Thailand (i.e. blocked sites and/or blocked ports), and I wanted to inquire about how there measures affect internet connections in real life.

On a side note, I would like to inform anyone that I don't need any advice on circumventing those measures, as I am an internet professional myself - I'm just asking what are the limitations on internet access in Thailand.

so... here are the questions:

- which providers block ports? which ones?

- which providers block sites? which ones?

- are there any providers who do not restrict access?

- which providers offer the best performance for someone living near Siam Country Club (Patts)?

Thank you.

[Nio]

If you are an internet professional, this info should be very easy for you to look up.

How many people here will have the whole list of the Ministry of Communications blocked websites memorized?

The list the last I heard is in the 1,000's of blocked sites

[monty]

There apparently is one list of blocked sites, which gets forwarded to the ISP's who then have the responsibility to block them.

Not all ISP's are as efficient as others in applying the block/updating the list, hence the differences people can experience. Theoretically ther should not be a difference!

How does this affect internet usage? Normally it doesn't at all, but at high load levels those servers can get overloaded resulting in high ping times and lost packets.

Easily tested for by doing a tracert, when you get pings of several hundred milliseconds on a domestic IP, you know what to blame!

Port blocking etc usually happens on pretty much all ISP's cheap home packages. It seems to be their preferred method of containing international bandwidth loads.

So basically it's the same with all ISP's, take a cheap package and you'll be sure to have some sort of blocking, throttling or other measures going on, move up to more expensive "business" or "premier" packages, and you'll have much less of that behind the scenes stuff go on.

I use Maxnet Premier, and the only thing they seem to do is limit the speed of single connections. Meaning a standard download will come in at 25% of rated speed, but when using a download manager doing 4 or more simultaneous connections full speed will be attained.

In general this is not a problem, apart from when streaming video. Youtube and the likes only stream on one connection, many times this results in frequent buffering.

[manarak]

Thank you for the useful reply Monty.

The limitations of single connections is bad news, I'll keep an eye on that when chosing my provider (I need to use a VPN for work, so that would be a single connection).

Useful to know is also whether ports 20,21,22,23,25 are blocked by default or not, since this would require some server-side rewiring if they are.

Are the restrictions like blocked ports, throttled traffic, etc. usually mentioned on the providers' service/sales documentation?

On second thought, are there any special services available that guarantee a certain speed to certain destinations, i.e. QOS agreements with the effect that when my router connects to a certain destination in Europe, the connection goes through reserved fiber bandwidth?