Broadband internet in Thailand

Posted on October 31, 2007
Tags: Asia, Techie |

If there was one thing I could change in Thailand, guess what it would be? Language barrier? Nope. Some cultural difference? No. The number one on my list would be: the internet. I get asked quite often by different people, how’s the internet here. I usually describe some of the problems I’m facing, and then I get asked: is it really that bad? Well, no it isn’t that bad, it is a lot worse than that! It just borders on the uselessness. The problems yous ask? Well where do I start..

1. Reliability - outages are normal here. The connection will die and then come back, some time later when it feels like it. At least daily.
2. Speed - 3Mbps? Not sure what they think the ‘b’ stand for but 3M-bollocks-per-second would be quite accurate.
3. Routing - packet caching means you get yesteryear’s data instead of current one
4. Routing number 2 - everything goes through a proxy, the ISP’s proxy. And no I don’t care about the p0r-n blocking they do. The effect of this for me is that now one of my favourite trading tools the stocktickr plugin stopped working because the ISP thinks the website I connect to to post my stocks data is improper(??), I’m quoting: “this url was and improper/obscene website or your package is localnet”. So now my stocks are “obscene”?
5. Disconnecting from my current ISP and trying another one means at least 7! business days of no internet. Even then there’s no guarantee it’ll be any better.

In summary, if you want to surf to check your email online or chat on IM then the internet here is sufficient. Anything beyond that, well good luck with that.

Ah yes I almost forgot, this experience is from the middle of Bangkok, I shudder at the thought of what the quality is like outside of this main city. They’re probably better off using Morse code out there :-)

Comments

10 Responses to “Broadband internet in Thailand”

trader on October 31st, 2007 12:59 pm

What is you usual R value? 200$? more?
eyal on October 31st, 2007 2:58 pm

trader - it could be that, or less, or more ;-) what does it matter?
Jerry on October 31st, 2007 5:31 pm

So how can you trade realtime if data is so old? I don’t think this help, but did IB change you to asia server (Hong Kong)?

If T1 is cheap there, it maybe the only choice. I just hope I have better luck in China.
Rick on October 31st, 2007 7:57 pm

You can have a redundant Internet connection and run a failover / load balancing router (Sonicwall’s 1260 has this feature but it’s about $1000). I’m not sure what your options are in Thailand, but if you could go with cable modem + DSL that would help. I always think about whether the two data connections are being run on the same telephone pole. I started looking in to this but it’s too cost prohibitive for my current situation but if I get to a point where I lose thousands of dollars if my Internet goes out, then I’ll make the investment.
eyal on October 31st, 2007 11:38 pm

Jerry - fortunately I don’t scalp, I trade of larger intraday timeframes such as the 15min. I also use multiple sources to double-check my data, including just the TWS quotes.

I have an open ticket at IB to change to the HK servers. I was told by one CS there they don’t change people over anymore. We’ll see.

Good luck in China. Let us know how it goes.

Rick - Those are good ideas. I have a few limitations: I’m in a rented apartment, there’s no cable internet here (AFAIK) and my area is only served by one provider. The next ISP I’m going to use may be better as I’ll be getting a business package, 3 times more expensive but if the connection is good then it’ll be worth it. If that doesn’t help then the next option is something close to a leased line (yet not quite) for about 15 times what I pay now. I’ll be resolving this in Dec / Jan. As you say, if I don’t take care of this it has the potential to cost me thousands of dollars, and that’s a conservative estimate.
Berti on November 1st, 2007 7:10 pm

Jerry, I have to go to China several times a year. The internet speed in the industrial areas is very good, but only to servers inside China. To Europe and America it´s extremely slow, most of the time 30-50 kbit/s. Last week I was there and could not even use IQFeed with Quotetracker. So I gave up. Maybe there are other ways, I only have the standard internet connection in our Chinese company. Good Luck!
MasterOfDisaster on November 7th, 2007 10:18 pm

Eyal,

I am developing a fully automated stock trading program. One component is a program that I wrote which webscrapes Yahoo finance pages for all the stocks that I am interested in.

I recently moved to Bangkok, and found to my horror that recently my ISP (True) is blocking access by my yahoo mining program to the yahoo webpages with that same warning:

“Your system was configured to deny access to this URL.Because this url was and improper/obscene website or your package is localnet”

What a pain! Is there any way around it besides having a server in the US (which is what I will ultimately do anyways for other reasons…)?

Strangely enough, True only gives me that message when my program tries to read yahoo web pages. When I look at it them manually using my browser, they come thru just fine. Hmm, maybe there is another way around this problem…
eyal on November 8th, 2007 9:25 am

MasterOfDisaster - a few other options besides a US server: 1. using a proxy - however this is officially illegal in the Kingdom.. 2. trying to get the data from another source like broker API or website. 3. emulating the browser header when requesting the data and hoping it will get thru whatever ridiculous filter they’re using. 4. changing ISP, but I’ve not tried a different one here yet. I intend to switch in December so will post a follow-up.
MasterOfDisaster on November 15th, 2007 1:53 am

I ended up having email correspondence with my Bangkok ISP (True), and they indicated that the problem was likely the fact that now I am supposed to go thru a proxy server.

So, I had to go back and configure both my browser as well as java programs to use their proxy settings.

Now, I do not get those alleged obscene website error messages anymore.

I still have quite slow connection speeds to US servers, however. Someone told me that that is because the Taiwan earthquake a year ro so ago severed the main US-SEAsia cable. They apparenetly are laying a new one, but it may be 1-2 more years. Anyone know the true situation here?
eyal on November 15th, 2007 3:19 pm

Interesting, I wasn’t aware True required proxy for HTTP traffic. I had some help from the folks at Stocktickr in terms of adding the headers to the plugin web call and now it’s connecting fine.

Yes part of the problem is the cable and I’ve heard similar timeframes mentioned. I’m not sure though that that’s the real bottleneck but I could be wrong.

Thanks for the update.