True Acts To Speed Up Broadband Service

[george]

True acts to speed up broadband service

BANGKOK: -- True Corp is expanding its broadband-Internet service’s bandwidth capacity after subscribers complained that its download speed is too slow.

True director Phaibul T Sirivanich said yesterday the company’s Internet-service provider, True Internet, had already requested additional international-Internet bandwidth from CAT Telecom to expand its capacity for subscribers to its Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL)-based broadband Internet.

A CAT source said the state agency was gradually allocating the extra bandwidth to True Internet.

Several of the company’s broadband-Internet subscribers have complained about access-traffic jams and a slower download speed.

True Internet occupies 1.7-gigabits-per-second of international-Internet bandwidth traffic out of a total of 3.4 gigabits per second.

The remainder is occupied by the other 17 Internet-service providers in Thailand.

True Internet’s subscriber numbers for it ADSL broadband Internet has jumped from 190,000 at the end of last year to 300,000.

Phaibul said he believed True Internet could achieve its subscriber-growth target of 400,000 by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, True Internet yesterday teamed with credit-card provider Krung Thai Card and two major banks, HSBC and the Standard Chartered Nakornthon Bank, to launch a new Internet-service campaign.

Cardholders of the three financial firms can pay a promotional rate of Bt590 a month for six months for True Internet’s broadband-Internet service, which features a download speed of 512 kilobits per second.

They then have to pay the full rate of Bt750 a month and will be given a free Internet-access modem worth Bt1,800.

True Internet recently applied for an Internet-provision licence from the national telecom regulator and plans to ask for a licence to create its own international-Internet gateway.

--The Nation 2005-07-21

[Zarkow]

Half of the article sounded like an ad...

We will just have to wait and see if they are telling us the TRUEth.

[Highwayman]

Several of the company’s broadband-Internet subscribers have complained about access-traffic jams and a slower download speed.

--The Nation 2005-07-21

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think maybe that should read several thousand or maybe several hundred thousand.

[The Coder]

This announcement backs up my suspicion that the bandwidth problem is due to true, not CAT. True is requesting just enough additional bandwidth from CAT to make room for the increased subscribers, not make it faster--just do the math. Let's face it, cheap computers come with a 1 gigabit Ethernet. True currently serves hundreds of thousands of people with less than 2 gigabits!!!

If you do the math you will see the increase allocates 56kbps per person with a 20% load (3.4gbps, 300k users, 20% on at one time). Hmm, what an interesting number as 56kbps is the familiar, slow is dialup modem speed. If you are a subscriber who buys the 512kbps package, you obviously still won't be able to count on getting it and may be at dialup speed and each new user just continues to over saturate it. Explains perfectly why the thing tends to be so slow, and will continue to be even after the new bandwidth increase. True needs to ask CAT for 10x or even 100x more bandwidth. 2x isn't going to do squat as they are over doubling users. As far as I can see, it is very misleading for true to state their objective is improving the service for its subscribers.

[monty]

Just one problem, CAT charges roughly 25000 Baht/month/1mbps bandwidth

True charges 890 Baht/month for a 1024/512 connection, so even with a contention ratio of 29:1, they would only just be able to pay CAT.

If they want to try to pay their overhead (salary's, accounting & billing, technical service...), forget about profit for the moment, they at least have to go to a contention ratio of 60:1 !!!

This means if only one third of the customers are online, they'll have each 51.2 kbps available

Now in my opinion CAT is the absolute culprit. They charge outrageous amounts for their international bandwidth, forcing ISP's into these ridiculous high contention ratio's...

There is much cheaper international bandwidth available, in different forms, only CAT has the absolute monopoly, and no ISP is allowed to buy this bandwidth, they can only buy from CAT.

On top of this, CAT skims 30% of every ISP's profit. (Every ISP had to relinguish 30% of their shares to CAT in order to receive an ISP licence)

Only this last rule will dissapear as gradually the ISP's are getting the new ISP licenses, issued directly by the ministry of communications...