September 7th, 2009
According to the latest press release from TOT, it appears that they will be launching 3G on 2100Mhz by early December. They ran a booth about this yesterday at Prachomklao Technology Institute (Phra Nakorn Nuea Campus). I originally thought they were going to launch on 1900Mhz given that they pulled down their ACT Thai Mobile 1900 GSM service for this purpose.
ส่วนย่านความถี่ที่ให้บริการคือ 1965-1980 MHz และ 2155 – 2170 MHz โดยมีความกว้างแถบคลื่น (Bandwidth) 15+15 MHz ตามมาตรฐานของ 3G คือ 1920-1980 MHz. และ 2110-2170 MHz โดยมีความกว้างแถบคลื่น (Bandwidth) 60+60 MHz ซึ่งระบบ 3G ของทีโอทีถือเป็น 3G ของแท้ที่ใช้ความถี่ย่านมาตรฐานต่างจากโอเปอเรเตอร์รายอื่นที่ทดสอบหรือให้ บริการในวงจำกัดขณะนี้
Source: http://www.manager.co.th/Telecom/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=9520000103214
This translates to “The frequency that will be offered for service will be 1965-1980Mhz and 2155-2170Mhz meaning a bandwidth of 15+15Mhz. The standard 3G band is 1920-1980Mhz and 2110-2170Mhz meaning a bandwidth of 60+60Mhz. TOT is offering a standard implementation of 3G as opposed to other operators which are testing and offering limited services.”
UMTS Band I (meaning, 3G on 2100Mhz) uses 1920-1980Mhz for uplink and 2110-2170Mhz for downlink, so this is what TOT is referring to (see wikipedia here). This band as defined in the 3G/UMTS definitions has a total bandwidth of 60Mhz and by the sound of it, TOT will be using 15Mhz of that 60 Mhz.
This makes sense. NTC earlier announced that it would be auctioning 4 licenses for 3G 2100Mhz: 1 x 15Mhz and 3 x 10 Mhz (so a total of 45 Mhz of bandwidth to be auctioned):
The NTC plans to auction four 2.1GH-3G-spectrum licences of which one will have a bandwidth of 15 megahertz, while the rest would be 10MHz.
Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2009/09/03/business/business_30111344.php
This means that TOT already has a license to offer services on the 3G 2100Mhz band because with the total final auctioning from NTC (noone really knows when this will happen, NTC keeps saying end of this year), all 60 Mhz will be finally allocated. So, bring on mobile virtual network operator (MVNO).. hopefully the big players (AIS, DTAC and True Move) will be using their service so we all will have a stop gap solution to 3G in the meantime!
All the 3G compatiable handsets sold here in the past 3-4 years would be compatible with this, as opposed to needing US or tri-band UMTS handsets.
Tags: 3G, HSDPA, TOT, UMTS
Posted in Geeky, Thailand | No Comments »
May 27th, 2009
Did you know that certain mobile phone numbers can be prestigious? This is one of those things that people from other places on Earth would never really understand. Although some 081 numbers are being reused now, if I had one from 10-12 years ago, I would probably still want to keep it. Luckily, I have had the same 089 number from 9 years ago and I really do intend to keep it that way.
I wanted to switch to True Move just because of their cheaper packages: DTAC charges 999 THB / month for unlimited data, True charges 250 THB / month. But I simply couldn’t bear to lose my number and the (sort of) prestige that goes with it. Plus, I have to SMS all my friends and let them know my new number which is going to take some time (but this is a more minor problem).
Number portability will be totally beneficial to the customer in price terms. Providers will be competing for new customers more rigorously, and more importantly for me, DTAC would also stop offering better promotions to new customers. Heck, I can get a prepaid SIM card from any other providers from one of the thousands of 7-11s nationwide and it’ll be cheaper. This exploitation of the provider locked (and relatively price inelastic) post paid customers must stop now.
All this has been talked about since 2003, and here in mid 2009? Still a pipe dream. In the latest round, the biggest telcos weren’t really interested in investing in a clearing house system (system that says which number belongs to which network). But I’m not too confused why big bully AIS and DTAC arn’t so keen on the system.. why invest some money to lose customers right? The NTC (the regulatory body, like Ofcom) should be able to do something about it though!
Malaysia and Singapore had it last year, and Hong Kong like a decade ago, and you wonder why we’re falling further and further behind them?
..in the meanwhile we’re still waiting for UMTS/HSDPA (3G) to arrive..
Tags: AIS, DTAC, Mobile, True
Posted in Geeky, Thailand | No Comments »
May 26th, 2009
I wasted nearly 2 hours in the department today trying to get a print out of my report.
There is this little problem we have in the department. Most of the ‘undergraduate-readily-accessible’ machines are either openSUSE (a Linux distribution) with OpenOffice or Windows XP with Office 2003 viewer. Of course, being on the cutting edge of technology, I opted to use Office 2010 to type my reports and I thought I had this problem nailed: converting documents to PDF to print in the department. Oh man, I was wrong, at least for the first 1 hour and 50 minutes.
Windows 7 doesn’t seem to like Adobe Acrobat/Distiller embedding system fonts into a PDF. So, it failed to convert my document. I wasn’t prepared to walk home to print, so in a desparate search for other solutions, I came across the Microsoft XPS Document Writer. You’d probably be going, what’s XPS? XPS is a loyalty-free format developed a few years back by Microsoft as direct competitor to the PDF. But, what was the point when PDF could do all you want: embedding font (if it works…), images and preserving all the layout/formatting? I don’t know. But you’d be surprised, all Vista (and Windows 7) machines open XPS documents out of the box. Just double click the file and it’ll open. Windows XP machines will need some extra downloads. On a Mac? You can go jump in the river.
But, there was really no point converting to XPS since the machines in the department wouldn’t be able to open them anyway. So, that idea went out the window and I started looking for another PDF converter. First Google result comes up with PrimoPDF. I’ve used it before but never really liked its dumbed down interface. It worked, it created my PDF file, except my graphs didn’t look right. They all looked really low resolution!
I went back to play around with Adobe Acrobat/Distiller again, and found a solution to my problem: untick ‘rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts’. I don’t know why, I won’t sit down and think about it, it just solved my problem. So I could now create a PDF with my standard beloved converter. But, my images still looked really low resolution! Playing with downsampling/quality settings did not improve things.
Another 30 minutes had passed, and I traced down my problem to the ‘drawing canvas’. This is the white space canvas that you can put it to kind of group all your objects/images/etc together. This was the first time I used this to help me space out my report properly. This is what is causing the problem with low resolutions images despite conversion settings. Solution today? Just take everything out of the drawing canvas, print the report and go home. A price I have to pay for using 2 pre-release software I guess?
PDF saved me yet again. Long live PDF.
Tags: Microsoft, Office 2010, PDF, Windows 7, XPS
Posted in Geeky, Life | 2 Comments »
May 12th, 2009
Ever wondered what the inside of the offices at the service centre at Canon Thailand looks like? (This centre is actually run by Canon Marketing (Thailand) Co., Ltd). I had the chance to look (well not really) at what goes on behind the doors at Canon when my camera with a CF card inside got returned to me. I sent my lens in to fix because the USM motor stopped working (costed me like 3,000 Baht), and the guy testing the camera didn’t delete any ‘test’ photos. This was back in January 2009.
Let’s start. This is what it is like at the customer facing end of their showroom/service centre looks like. It’s essentially a nice little show room with some good printing equipment and lenses on show. A free coffee machine which I temporarily broke also (well, it didn’t want to serve any more latte after mine). This is the only photo I took in the whole entire album.
This is behind the general environment behind the doors. Upon close inspections, the lady infront is (obviously) soldering something and those fume ducts take away all the fumes associated with it. The people at the back of the room have headphones with microphones on their heads. I guess those are the people you call up to check whether your order is ready to be picked up?
From the photos that I have seen, they seem to be working in English. Note this mini symptom and remedies table.
I guess each ‘chang’ (mechanic/engineer/fixer/etc) has their own work locker. I guess each work would be given a state: “Assign status”, “repairing process”, “quotation status” or “waiting for parts”. All the labels are in English.
Did anyone notice the brand of the furniture? “Lucky”. I haven’t seen those around since late 90s, so possibly investments from a while back.
Hold on, I wouldn’t be too happy if someone had left my camera on the table without its body cap like that? I even face the camera down while changing lenses!
Let’s see what folders are of interest to our Japanese company:
- “No job sheet”
- “Customer showroom”
- “Dealer and mail”
- “Branch”
- “CD CC CM 2008″ (any ideas what this is?)
- “Camera Doc” (gosh I would love that folder)
- “Exchange job sheet”
- “Send dealer by sale”
- “Send mail”
- “Delivery from dealer sale”
- “(something) from mail”
- “Dealer mail”
- “Daily check list” (lol!)
- “Incoming doc”
- “Product from branch”
- “From Sysney(?), Welltech, TNT(?)”
- “Send recall”
- “Repair job 2008″
- “Form (something) showroom branch”
- “2008″
- “Exchan(?) FOC 2008″
- “Reply job from Dealer”
So any ideas what this department might be?
Tags: Canon, Photography
Posted in Life | 2 Comments »
