Probably related to the launch of Thaicom4

Check out

http://www.ji-net.com/index.php?lang=en&pid=78

While the prices are down only a bit (around 10% compared to csloxinfo), Jinet offers 2gb of data transfer compared to the 750mb Csloxinfo offered.

While 2gb is not a whole lot, it's much more realistic for home use...

Previously a 2 gb download transfer would have costed almost 6400 Baht with Csloxinfo

Still not that realistic, when you consider what you pay for the initial installation and the monthly fees. Basically, you pay a LOT more for limited, laggy, depends-on-the-weather service. Now, if they allowed something like 10GB/month transfer, it would actually be worth applying for.

The only good point is the availability. Otherwise, it's way overpriced, and not in tune with the times (and you thought Thailand's ADSL was out of tune with the times...).

Firefox, you do have a point about it still being expensive, but we do have to realize that satellites are expensive, have a limited lifetime, and are frigging high above the earth

Even our neighbours in Hong Kong or Singapore have to pay the same ridiculous amounts for sattelite internet, if they are unlucky enough not to have some other form of high speed internet access! (and they have no CAT )

(source:SkyBlast Hong Kong, 6000 Baht/month for 2Gb admittedly with bursts up to 1Mb/sec, but only oneway system)

Fact is, it should only be needed in rural areas, where wired infrastructure (cable or phone/adsl) is unavailable, and not viable to install...

But even now, bang in the center of Pattaya/Jomtien, there are areas not serviced by adsl, heck, you only have to move just over Sukhumvit to find yourself in an area where even no phonelines are available

So, no, I do not find the current price unreasonable, only the fact we should even look at these prices is unreasonable (apart from those who chose to go live in the boonies )

What happens if someone steals the dish? Are you liable to pay for it?

thanks

nam

Good question, but fortunately nobody stole mine, so no idea about replacement cost

Will be quite a job though, since normally it's quite solidly mounted to either you house or a concrete block...

Gonna be a bit hard to get away unnoticed as well with a huge bright white dish on your back It's about 3 times bigger then the standard UBC dish, and a lot heavier...

The locals would steal mine and make a cooking pot out of it

or a hat

Does this solution require a regular phone line to dial up and connect to send data and it only receives data from the dish? I couldn't figure this out from the web page. It calls the hardware a "receiver" (versus a transceiver) yet I see what look like transmission speeds of 64 & 128 which are obviously higher than a 56K modem can do. Can someone clarify this?

The thing I often hear about dish solutions is they have very bad lag/ping making them impractical for real time usage (eg: gaming, video conferencing) because they burst data back to each PC in a round robin fashion so if there's 1000 PC's wanting data you have to wait for your turn. These packages don't seem very cheap and don't seem very fast. So second question is are there any other technologies applicable to an extremely rural location?

a big wok should do the job

Coder,

no phoneline required... It is a fully two-way system!

Indeed there are high lag times involved, but they are not caused by the reason you say, but merely by the fact that the signals have to travel such long distances!

Expect ping times to be in the region of 900-1200 msec (the roundtrip from your dish to the groundstation at speed of light takes around 600 msec, add to that the regular ping timesto the Us from Thailand)

Although 1 sec doesnt't seem a whole lot, it does mess a bit with videoconferencing / VOIP, but certainly not to the point making it useless, more a bit of getting used to...

It gets worse with things like VPN, where received packets need to be confirmed as received within a very short time. If that confirmation comes to late, you lose your VPN connection!

Second question: Simply no other solution for rural areas in Thailand, apart from maybe gprs, but this has even more lag then satellite (2-3sec pings!!!)

Interesting, thank you sir!