Setting Up A Home Office In Bangkok

[clekkas]

Hi Everyone,

I just discovered this forum and I am exstatic that such forum exits to help me.

I am moving to Thailand with my wife at the end of this year. We currently live in Canada. I am a computer programmer and will continue to work remotely from Thailand.

I will need to have access to the Internet and do my business over VoIP. Thanks to this forum I have an idea of several providers so I am not worried about this issue.

Do some of the ISPs provide smtp mail for you?

My question is what VoIP providers do u find best and how reliable is the line to do your business?

Another thing that I can't live without here is my blackberry/Treo toys. I do need to have access to my email wherever possible. Do any telecom companies in Thailand support a blackberry or Treo device?

I will be living in the area of Nontabury and will be glad if I any of you are in the area and like to get together socially will be great.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[autonomous_unit]

There are many western ISPs who can give you a registered domain name and POP/IMAP/SMTP email service for very reasonable prices, e.g. less than $50 US per year. If you can find one that supports SSL security for both reading and sending email, I'd suggest that rather than trying to have your email go through a Thai ISP (particularly if you mostly correspond with North Americans). The local ISPs do not provide great service, and you are more likely to end up in a spam trap.

I do this but am not interested in advertising for the ISP that I use... they don't pay me for that. You can always run something locally to pull a copy off IMAP to your local PC to avoid the discomfort of interactively reading email from another continent. I find that remote access to a US IMAP server is not too bad over my True ADSL line, unless someone sends me multi-megabyte attachments that I didn't care to download at that time...

I don't know about blackberry/treo services here... I would avoid them for the same reason as the ISP comments above. GPRS Internet works OK for many people, so if you have devices that can do regular IMAP/SMTP over GPRS, you shouldn't need any special support from the local telecoms.

I spent several months doing ssh and IMAP access over GPRS to the US and survived, though I was happy to get an ADSL like going. Ironically, GPRS adds so much latency that it is not much worse to go Thailand->US over GPRS than it is to just go US->US over GPRS.

[clekkas]

Thanks alot autonomous,

Your suggestions are very helpfull.

[h90]

I am just telling the same!

I run www.psxtune.com and with sending emails with the ISP called "true" in Thailand I often get troubles that the smtp is listed as spam emailserver, so take care about that before you come.

Also Internetconnection might be sometimes bad and of course there are always problems when it is urgent. So maybe if money is not a problem use IPStar second.

Else WELCOME IN THAILAND!

h90

I forgot: search for transparent proxies in Thailand, thats also a topic (censorship proxy), but I had never any problem...

Thanks alot autonomous,

Your suggestions are very helpfull.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Edited October 10, 2005 by h90