3g In Thailand - When?

[Peter_Patong]

Does any know when 3G/UMTS will be avable in Thailand? And by who??

Edited June 9, 2006 by Peter_Patong

[rcm]

Does any know when 3G/UMTS will be avable in Thailand? And by who??

hmmm i guess it will be a while...we having so far Edge in BKK and towards Pattaya so we are still away from the coverage of that ....once they done that they will start with the 3 g (i guess).

rcm

[Tywais]

Does any know when 3G/UMTS will be avable in Thailand? And by who??

Apparantely the new airport already has it. Dtac & Nokia announced plans in 2004 to build a center. And AIS is in negotiations now. CAT & TOT are another story all together in terms of licsencing the frequencies. Suspect it will be quite a while before it is wide spread what with the usual politicing taking place.

[Maestro]

Does any know when 3G/UMTS will be avable in Thailand? And by who??

Don’t hold your breath! Even in Europe , where mobile phone providers paid exorbitant concession fees for UMTS, they are slow to implement it, due to the high infrastructure cost and the perceived lack of demand.

In Thailand, like everywhere else, I guess it will depend on the demand. At the moment, even GPRS seems little used in Thailand.

By whom? If and when the time comes, it will most probably be introduced by the provider with the largest subscriber base, which at the moment is AIS. Another possibility, of course, is that is will be the provider with the best government connection at that future time.

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Maestro

[bkk_mike]

I thought there was 3G in Bangkok already?

But it's not UMTS. It's CDMA2000...

Hutchison CAT.

And yes the CAT in the company name is the same CAT that is responsible for the slow international internet connections that we all love so much...

Edited June 9, 2006 by bkk_mike

[terdsak_12]

I have a 3G phone and called AIS when it will be ready to use. They said in about 3-4 months!!!!

[Mr_Happy]

Think most 3G phones will fallback to GSM and work... mine does anyways...

[Crushdepth]

Well EDGE is 3G...but 3G was a load of hype, it's still dog slow. I'm waiting for 4G...

[Khutan]

If you look at the news carefully, you will see that there have not been any 3G lisences sold.

In theory Edge is 2.75G, whatever that means.

But as a general question, what will you use 3G for ? I don't want to make video phone calls, nor do I want Fax forwarding and all the other rubbish that is the difference between what the current operators offer and 3G has.

At the moment, I am doing some 3G work with one of the operators and the features fail to impress me as a consumer. The general consensus in the 3G test Lab is apart from Fax forwarding and Video phone calls, and a few other features, 3G is really for a Business user, rather than an end consumer.

3G is little more than wide band CDMA, with some provisioning add-ons. Please before you flame me, please read the 3G standard.

[tjo o tjim]

My take is that 3G will only be successful if the carriers wise up and focus on just providing bandwidth and let the marketplace come up with uses for it. Mobile operators think they have great ideas, but they force too much control on it.

BTW, EDGE is considered 2.75G.