This Sunday i was in Phuket and went with a newly found friend Amnaj Ponrit up to Yacht Haven Marina Phuket.

He was there to demo the CCU-650 card and some amplifier antenna which he supplies to customers, he had found my website on the internet and invited me along for a demo of his products.

We visited a nice couple there Fred Roswold and Judy Jensen in their boat “WINGS”.

WINGS

In their boat the reception was great, and we could download files and listen to the various radio stations and surf the internet at the same time using the CCU-650, of course we were still just at the marina, not at sea.

Youtube was no problem either using the CCU-650.

Amnaj has already been out in a boat to check the reception around Phuket, with a UPS onboard and various antenna and amplifier equipment.

And it appears to be quite workable.

With the equipment provided by Amnaj you should be able to pick up reception up until 50 miles from the nearest broadcast tower, these are of course rough numbers which might vary.

You should be able to contact him at: amnart.plonrit (at) gmail.com.

With the amplifier products it means you could pick up good internet reception along most of Thailands coast.

I will also take some of Amnajs equipment for extension of CCU650 coverage on the road, perhaps using the bus to Krabi and further to Had Yai and towards the Malaysian border.

It should work quite well on the bus with an amplifier or a booster, i will update this blogpost or create a new one with the exact equipment being used at a later time.

In Norway i have used a similiar technology from a provider called ICE, however this was on the 400MHz band.

With the product in Norway i was able to sit and do work on most public transports, buses trains etc, and that even without an amplifier or external antenna, the 400MHz has a longer reach than the 800MHz which is being used by CAT and HUTCH in Thailand, that means with 800MHz you need more towers/basestations to cover the same area, initially that means a higher cost in development of your network.

But with more basestations you will of course be able to serve more customers.

Also the higher Hertz will mean more amount of waves in any specific timeframe and this will make it possible that 800MHz will attain speeds which 400MHz never can reach if both are using the same technology.

But the higher the Hertz the lesser the reach of the signal, the card in your hand or computer will however always be the weak link, but your cards receiving and sendign ability can be improved with an amplifier.

Also many has noticed that the last 3-4 months internet by ADSL in Thailand and Phuket has been terrible, but EVDO by CAT telecom does not notice this decrease in downloading power much, some days i will just disconnect my computer from my ADSL and use the CCU-650 or Aircard Sierra Wireless 580 from my home if i need to get something done.

The reason why xDSL is so slow and the EVDO service is not slow is of course that CAT teelecom and the other providers will have put restraints on the DSL traffic, this is quite easy for them to do, since they will have specific pools of ip adresses which will be the source of all xDSL traffic, they can then set bandwidth limitations on these in their backbone, aswell as making sure that bandwidth sharing budgets are in place at the termination point where customers normally share their DSL with other customers.

During my tests of the DSL service from CAT telecom and the EVDO service from Cat telecom i have noticed that their routes are quite similar they travel through the same providers networks through to japan and california and then to the rest of america and europe.

There are slight differences though but only when it comes to the adresses of some routers forwarding the traffic, the organisations forwarding the traffic are the same through asia ->japan->california, so perhaps CAT telecom is routing their EVDO traffic to less congested links compared to the amounts of users of the respective services.

I am getting easily 100KBps download speeds from various international locations through my EVDO, while others with the ADSL are staying well below 10 KBps.

Some have even been getting well below that, there might be several reasons, one reason being that some of the users you are sharing with are receiving or sending large amounts of data either with torrent clients, or their machines are infected with malware which the owners are not even being aware of. This kind of malware spewing out data will then cripple connections.

Torrent clients in themselves are quite malwarish, some users will forget that not turning the torrent client off means that the entire world is out there downloading your shared files, crippling the internet for other people.

Another fact which has been the source of much dismay for outsourcing companies are the many breakages which have happened in some rather important backbones carrying data to and from India and some other south east asian countries.

This unfortunate fact will of course also affect Thailand, because then traffic for so many users are being routed elsewhere, and quite positively some of that traffic will surge onto backbones which Thai traffic to and from the outside world depends upon.