Tot

[allexx]

Published: 09:00 22.08.2006 GMT+2 /HUGIN /Source: Ericsson /SSE: ERIC /ISIN: SE0000108656

Ericsson to deliver high-performance broadband to TOT in Thailand

Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERICY) has been selected by TOT Public Company Limited (TOT), Thailand's leading fixed-line operator, to deliver its EDA solution to provide high performance broadband services to subscribers across the country.

With this contract, TOT becomes the first operator in Thailand to deploy IP MSAN (Multi Service Access Node), which will be integrated into the operator's existing nationwide network architecture. This will allow TOT to provide its customers with an ultra-high speed broadband connection of up to 24Mbps.

[monty]

Utterly and completely useless unless they increase international bandwidth!

Most customers' actual line speed is already much higher then the international bandwidth avilable from the ISP to the outside world...

Hence 2 mbps connections slowing down to modem speed when connecting to servers located abroad

Unless of course for acquiring local content, or for accessing P2P netwroks located within Thailand...

[marshall stanley]

I pay B1100 a month for TOT's Gold Cyber at 1,000 speed. I get near that from my PC here in Chatuchak BKK to the TOT server but from TOT"s server to any Internet site I get from 70kb to 300 kb depending on traffic. 85% of the worlds websites and servers are located in North America. Streaming video needs 350k minimun sustained, streaming radio 96 to 128 k - I get this about 10% of the time at best. (But I'm paying for 1,000 speed!!)

What they call Internet in Thailand is really Intranet - Inter-net is international. North America is the default for the Internet. All traffic that is a simple dot com or dot net goes to Sunnyvale first (California)

When you see a dot co dot th or a co dot my or a co dot de those are servers located in those countries. Within those countries those sites are Intra-net, not Inter-net. I dont think TOT knows the difference.

go here: www.internettrafficreport.com It's called an ITR client and gives you general status in real time as to the regions of the world that are reporting traffic and see where the weakest place is.

Download the ITR client - its a small program and ping to your hearts content. For all you geeks out there you'll love it.

[nikster]

I pay B1100 a month for TOT's Gold Cyber at 1,000 speed. I get near that from my PC here in Chatuchak BKK to the TOT server but from TOT"s server to any Internet site I get from 70kb to 300 kb depending on traffic. 85% of the worlds websites and servers are located in North America. Streaming video needs 350k minimun sustained, streaming radio 96 to 128 k - I get this about 10% of the time at best. (But I'm paying for 1,000 speed!!)

What they call Internet in Thailand is really Intranet - Inter-net is international. North America is the default for the Internet. All traffic that is a simple dot com or dot net goes to Sunnyvale first (California)

When you see a dot co dot th or a co dot my or a co dot de those are servers located in those countries. Within those countries those sites are Intra-net, not Inter-net. I dont think TOT knows the difference.

go here: www.internettrafficreport.com It's called an ITR client and gives you general status in real time as to the regions of the world that are reporting traffic and see where the weakest place is.

Download the ITR client - its a small program and ping to your hearts content. For all you geeks out there you'll love it.

Firstly, you need to understand that you are paying for 1000 BITS per second, denoted by a small b, as in 1Mbps. See the small 'b'? That means bits per second.

Second, when you look at your browser's download speeds, you see BYTES per second, denoted by an uppercase 'B'. As in KB/s.

1 Byte = 10 bit (8 bits + start bit + stop bit)

It follows that 100KB/s == 1000Kbps. Confusing, but I guess 1000 sounds better in marketing.

So if you get 100KB/s outside Thailand, it's pretty good. If you get 300, it would be astonishing. If you get 40 - 70 to outside Thailand, that's normal because of the narrow international gateway.

The main thing that makes internet in Thailand slow though is the lag time. I get anywhere from 300 to 500 ms lag time, so that means absolutely nothing happens for this amount of time before I hear back from the server. In the U.S., I get 20 - 70ms, 100ms in rare cases.

Hope that clears up things

[xyz]

Utterly and completely useless unless they increase international bandwidth!

Most customers' actual line speed is already much higher then the international bandwidth avilable from the ISP to the outside world...

Hence 2 mbps connections slowing down to modem speed when connecting to servers located abroad

Unless of course for acquiring local content, or for accessing P2P netwroks located within Thailand...

I dunno where you got this bit about slowing down to modem speed when connecting to servers located abroad from but I got Download Speed: 4696 kbps (587 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 1704 kbps (213 KB/sec transfer rate) going from east coast USA to THAIVISA.COM BANDWIDTH METER. I'm on a 15000 kbps download, 1800 kbps upload, fiber optics line in Wash. DC area.

[monty]

XYZ, We're talking Thailand here, not the USA

When you are in Thailand, all internet traffic to any server located outside Thailand goes trough the Communications Authority of Thailand (CAT, government monopoly + blocking of the "undesirable" websites)

This one single pipe is not even close to being able to handle all the traffic, hence the slowdowns when downloading internationally.

thaivisa.com is currently hosted in Singapore, a country with an advanced internet network, so between Singapore and the US you'll see very high speeds!

Your test does confirm Thaivisa is hosted on a pretty fast server though

[xyz]

XYZ, We're talking Thailand here, not the USA

When you are in Thailand, all internet traffic to any server located outside Thailand goes trough the Communications Authority of Thailand (CAT, government monopoly + blocking of the "undesirable" websites)

This one single pipe is not even close to being able to handle all the traffic, hence the slowdowns when downloading internationally.

thaivisa.com is currently hosted in Singapore, a country with an advanced internet network, so between Singapore and the US you'll see very high speeds!

Your test does confirm Thaivisa is hosted on a pretty fast server though

I was trying to find a Thai server to do the speed test to see if you are right; and adslthailand.com seems to be it. I was able to get 408 kbps on it. Some people living in Chiang Mai have gotten about 800 kbps to Seattle (see link). So it looks like you are wrong about "connections slowing down to modem speed when connecting to servers located abroad."

[autonomous_unit]

Nobody is saying that Thailand's internet link to the world is a modem, so measure a transfer above modem speed does not prove by contradiction that the network is fast.

When I had 1024/512 Kb/s ADSL in Bangkok, I routinely saw the download speed from North America to my laptop severely limited, e.g. 100 Kb/s when it was working, and lots of total dropouts. At the very same time, I could upload at very close to the maximum 512 Kb/s back to North America. This is because too many people are trying to pull data into Thailand from overseas, and the international link is a congestion point. The effect is most noticeable in the evening on weeknights, say 6-10pm (6-10am US central daylight-savings time).

At these times, regular (cheap) phone calls from overseas also have many strange distortions and artifacts, probably because they are VOIP-based and getting stuck in the same congested network. The distortions were always on the audio I was hearing on this end, while people could hear me clearly back in North America.

So, downloading data from a server in Thailand to North America will not approximate what end-users here experience going the other way. Also, a real server quite likely has a better QoS package than your average home user on cheap ADSL.

[fourbaht]

Monty is correct.. Even TOT and CAT will tell you that their international bandwith is not enough to support this type of high speed connection at present.

I have changed from Cyber Gold as after talking to one of the managers I was informed that the problem was that the Pacific internet connection to the outside world had used its bandwidth quota for the month..

True or not I am not sure but Cyber Silver gave me faster speeds as it does not use Pacific for its international connection.

[The Coder]

I was trying to find a Thai server to do the speed test to see if you are right; and adslthailand.com seems to be it. I was able to get 408 kbps on it.

Note there are enormous speed bumps in front of subscribers in Thailand. Accessing a Thai server when in the USA is a lot different than going through true adsl from thailand to a server in the USA. You go through the shared overcommited ADSL lines, through the slow true proxy servers performing slow censoring checks, through the oversold international bandwidth the ISP didn't buy enough of, and even then each persons bandwidth is "shaped" based on what they are doing. Want ftp? maybe they give you a 100kbps cap. Want file sharing? maybe they give you a 5kbps cap. Those are not typos. You are at their mercy and they don't guarantee anything because they deliver next to nothing to you.

Some people living in Chiang Mai have gotten about 800 kbps to Seattle (see link). So it looks like you are wrong about "connections slowing down to modem speed when connecting to servers located abroad."

No way that is representative, must be more theoretical! I was trying it to see what I could get with the test but kept DNS server failures, LOL so I couldn't even finish it. Good old true ADSL...

Edited September 6, 2006 by The Coder

[xyz]

From reading this thread, it looks like some people just aren't happy until they can get a slow speed off a fast connection or until they trash a good thing. It's too bad.

Edited September 6, 2006 by xyz

[A_Traveller]

Just to confirm, it is acknowledged, in private, that there are capacitance issues with international connexions here. Further software {from an American company} was purchased to manage {by using mirrors and traffic 'shaping'} traffic profiles and try to reduce the demand.

The additional burden of the censorship process is another layer of complexity.

Within Thailand however, even at peak times communications from physically diverse systems within the Kingdom is often rapid and close to expected speed provided by the ISP. However, once one accesses the www outside the country the degradation in capacitance is noticeable, even in some case dramatic.

There are other issues where subscribers of 'domestic' ADSL are trying to run businesses which further skew the traffic. By the by, I don't just mean internet cafés, but I've come across substantial commercial enterprises which use ADSL in such a manner.

Part of this issue, is the commercial imperative where the lack of local content leads to a lack of investment, the ultimate example of the reverse of this equation is South Korea.

I am not knocking the ISP's per se, nor having a whinge, I am saying though that when my people have to manage mirror servers, yes servers, the impact of the bottleneck in communications in Thailand is both noticeable and has to be accounted for in planning synchronisation processes.

Using so called speed analysers is most times, at best, spurious and at worst completely misleading. After all there is no such thing as speed in this context, it is all about capacitance.

Regards

PS as an example the connexion for the urchin script used by TV from Google is so slow it actually delays the refresh of the page when viewed in Thailand.

[Deksan]

XYZ, We're talking Thailand here, not the USA

When you are in Thailand, all internet traffic to any server located outside Thailand goes trough the Communications Authority of Thailand (CAT, government monopoly + blocking of the "undesirable" websites)

This one single pipe is not even close to being able to handle all the traffic, hence the slowdowns when downloading internationally.

thaivisa.com is currently hosted in Singapore, a country with an advanced internet network, so between Singapore and the US you'll see very high speeds!

Your test does confirm Thaivisa is hosted on a pretty fast server though

Tot has its own Gateway set up ... from apnic :

inetnum: 203.190.250.0 - 203.190.251.255

netname: TOT-IIG-TH

descr: TOT International Internet Gateway business unit, Transit Internet Service for ISP in thailand,Bangkok,Thailand

country: TH

admin-c: PA82-AP

tech-c: SS110-AP

status: ASSIGNED PORTABLE

mnt-by: APNIC-HM

mnt-routes: MAINT-TH-TOT

Still no news on TRUE-IIG

[astral]

Monty is correct.. Even TOT and CAT will tell you that their international bandwith is not enough to support this type of high speed connection at present.

True but it is good to have something to aim for.

I have changed from Cyber Gold as after talking to one of the managers I was informed that the problem was that the Pacific internet connection to the outside world had used its bandwidth quota for the month..

If this is true then it is pathetic, and a sad indictment of TOT and CAT.

[Lannig]

In last week's Bangkok Post Database, there was an article about Thailand trying to be an outsourcing destination for Japanese buisnesses (especially for IT).

Whether this is realistic or not is debatable, but the writer made a very good point that Thailand's poor international connectivity definitely makes it more difficult. So at least some people start realizing this.

--Lannig

[meadish_sweetball]

They need to finally let go and let the private sector start creating their own pipes out.

[tigerbeer]

why do they bother trying in the first place? its frustrating enough to have them offering 2MB's without delivery!