MrPavee

No, I do not want the iPhone. I will stand firm by this choice, it’s a waste of money and nothing more than a glorified iPod which apparently to some people make you have ’status’ and ‘belong to the cool people’s cult’ *yuck*.

The iPhone will be flooding the Thai market even more than it has already, not because it is cheap or because it is good, but because it is seen as a symbol of status: just like how some of the ‘nouveau richie’ like to drive the best cars to show off (eventhough they bought it under Aeon 36-months 0% interest scheme or something, but that, they’ll never tell you).

True Move just released the iPhone pricing as I saw on the newspaper this morning. There are four packages, and I will quote the silver package which is the cheapest package where the iPhone is free (as it is in the other markets). It starts at 1,399 (+7% VAT) Baht (so about 26 pounds / month). This gives you 100 minutes, 100 texts and 1GB of data allowance (notice how the data allowance is not unfairly and unethically marketed as ‘unlimited’ with a fair usage policy like the UK).

100 minutes and 100 texts? What the hell is that all about? In the world’s most competitive market for mobile telecommunications (it is, trust me I read somewhere before) this deal is totally absurd. True is competing in a market for which it costs as low as 0.25 Baht/minute (0.04p a minute [yes 0.04p]) to call anywhere in the country, and this goes for both prepaid and postpaid customers. Paying 1,399 Baht for 24 months (= 33576 Baht).. isn’t it better to buy a jail-broken Hong Kong iPhone for around 20,000 Baht? Or even better, buy a prepaid iPhone from O2 UK for 349 pounds (= 18,000 Baht) and use the tricking SIM to unlock.

Secondly, the Thai market is very much prepaid orientated. About 80% of customers (so I recall from an article, again) are prepaid customers. Why is this? It’s because most people do not call a lot, and even if they do, the prices of prepaid is hardly that much more expensive than postpaid. The only people that use postpaid are those that do not want to have the hassle of getting prepaid cards, or refilling at ATMs (cash machines). Remember what happened to Hutch (aka Three) when they came to Thailand and tried to implement a tariff-for-’free’-mobile-deal-kinda-thing back in 2002? It never worked. Most people were not up to paying 1500 baht a month (but mind you, even then Hutch did give you thousands of minutes as opposed to 100!). Hutch is a failed mobile telco in this country (after of course, Thai Mobile 1900 by TOT with 65k customers!!).

Lastly, there are realistically no UMTS/HSDPA networks in Thailand (with the exception of AIS’ 900Mhz system in Chiang Mai and AIS 2100Mhz demo system in their Central World shop). The iPhone ‘experience’ (ugh!) is designed to revolve around fast data on the fly. The current 2.75G EDGE system currently in place will handle fast enough data (it does about 100-150kbps) for mobile-only usage but its latency just won’t cut it. It takes about 800ms (yes, nearly 1 second) for a data sent to go across the network as opposed to about 15-20ms of ADSL systems (or 100-200ms of UMTS/HSDPA systems). This means that more real-time things such as chats and Google Maps (overly rated for the iPhone) will feel less real-time. Webpage browses on the Safari (yes, the Apple-browser) will feel sluggish too, with clicks responding much slower than one is being used to. [Notice that I said there are no UMTS/HSDPA networks, but not no 3G; that’s because there is 3G in over half of the country as CAT CDMA with a data rate of a few mbps].

Now, so all in all, should True sell its iPhone under the contracts well it would not be because people are after its features, or online-orientated experience, or its big-gulp 100 minutes but rather because as a symbol of status

I will stop my ever so random rant now. Down to hell with Apple cult!

Now that the parliament will convene on Monday to select a new Prime Minister, there is definitely quite a few developments that one will see. There are four choices at the moment:

1. The Democrats forming a government - this by the looks of it is the most likely choice, and a choice by far preferred by both local and international investors. However, the likeliness of this happening may change tonight after the formal ‘phone in’ of fugitive Thaksin because the coalition partners would still have to back the Dems, and the defected Peun Nawin faction of PPP would have to stay together.
2. The Puea Thai forming a government - this is also another choice that will seem more likely (or not) depending on what Thaksin says tonight. This will definitely be a choice that is favoured by Thaksin, but will be the more damaging option to the country as the PAD has already vowed to come out and protest again (in its press release yesterday) should any government have anyone from Puea Thai.
3. A coup - this is no longer an option in 2008. Everyone can remember very well the abysmal performance of the interim Surayud government (”old ginger”). The society would also no longer accept this option, and we would probably no longer see pink and red roses handed out to soldiers on the streets.
4. Intervention by the HMTK - an option that is still open but unlikely. Many people, even The Economist a few months back (if my memory serves right), have asked for this option. Even if he came out to speak, there are still many uncertainty which may arise from this and both sides will analyse the speech in a different manner (does anyone remember what happened after a foreign correspondent asking the princess whether the PAD has a royal backing?).

Now, let’s pray that 1 happens and we see a competant PM and economic team running the country once and for all (come on, what happened in the last 6 months?).

For those who doesn’t know what DTAC is, it’s Thailand’s second largest mobile phone operator/telco (the likes of Vodafone, T-Mobile, Cingular, etc). I was searching the web for a new (cheap) package to put my phone on now that I’m going to be away from Thailand for 2 months in the UK. I waited for about 40 seconds in the queue.

Take a look at the screenshot and you’ll know for yourself (click for larger):

I went “what the hell” when I saw the window open up, and quickly press “denied” so that my webcam wouldn’t be broadcasting my face too! For erm, my own reasons, I’ve blacked out my full name and phone number, but I don’t mind you knowing what promotion I’m on !

She was also trained to wave goodbuy once I was done asking my questions !

Though quite a nice gimmick, I doubt it’s very good use of call center (centre, sorry) resource. Nice for me changing promotions in the UK though, saves long distance talks.

PS Note the ever increasing use of the Telenor logo. I bet DTAC will be Telenor Thailand in the next year or so.

I’m flying back to the UK in a week’s time and I’ve got too many remaining things to do. I have got to finish an outstanding yearbook, a website for a client, a system for submitting papers for an upcoming academic conference, organise the timings for our stall at the freshers fair, sort out our freshers squash, sort out my options for next year and finally sign up for CSLoxinfo 4Mbps/512kbps ADSL instead of CAT 2/2Mbps g.shdsl (is it any good?).

What a hectic week coming. This was like a summer holiday I totally did nothing.

PS I’m considering no longer flying with Etihad or Emerates, on the sole reason that they jailed someone for 4 years for having poppy seeds stuck to his shirt. (Poppy seeds are an important ingredient in many types of food worldwide, even my favourite Subway Sweet Onion Sauce, but is illegal is the UAE).

I’m a HiNet by CAT user, on the Premium 2/2Mbps g.shdsl package. I noticed something wrong when I tried sending out an email on my university account today. The error came back through Outlook while connecting to the outgoing mail server (SMTP) with “The encryption type you selected is not supported by the server”. This surprised me, so being as geeky as I am, I looked into it.

It turned out that at first sight, my university’s outgoing mail server stopped supporting encryption. But looking deeper into it, there seemed to be an SMTP proxy in between the real server and me. This happened to every single server that I looked at, if I made an outgoing connection through port 25, I would connect to this same server with the same welcome message.

To note: it is about 1.30am in Thailand.

Let’s try the Gmail outgoing mail server, smtp.gmail.com:

> telnet smtp.gmail.com 25

220 [209.85.143.109] ESMTP Smtpd; Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:33:15 +0700

…

Note here that, smtp.gmail.com resolves to 209.85.143.109 which is not a local Thai IP, but somehow it has a Thai timestamp, with a GMT+7 timezone (oh, coincidence I’m sure).

So I’m going to put this in non-technical words for you: what this clearly shows is that CAT is putting a fake system in between me and the real system (the fake system would pretend to be the real system). The fake system does not support encryption (the scrambling of data sent so that no one can intercept the data, except the sender and the receiver systems). I think this was done in the hope that people will make unencrypted attempts to logon and so the government can log your usernames and passwords and log all emails you send in and out.

I have routed my emails through my secondary True ADSL connection for now since that still supports encryption with the right certificate. I will be setting up an encrypted VPN channel between here and my system in the UK soon and route all emails traffic through that.

What the government has clearly shown here is that they’re willing to go every step in invade the privacy and basic human rights of the people of this country. This should be heavily frowned upon and heavily condemed.

This country is heading for a serious downfall, and if this government doesn’t get out now, it may well be too late.

PS Did you know this country also has an ISP and Corporate Level internet data 90-days retention policy. What this means is, they force all internet service providers and companies providing internet to their staff to log all the traffic that flows in and out for at least 90 days (or face 500,000 baht fine). This is ridiculous both in the sense that it clearly invades the privacy of users, and in technical terms because this system will be very costly in practise.

—————————-

Edit 2: SMTP connections through CAT no longer seems to be going through this fake server.