Currently i am in the province of Naratiwat south in Thailand.

Been around town in Sunghai Kolok and testing CCU-650 on the CAT telecom CDMA2000-EVDO network has been a smooth experience.

This will also be true later when hopefully the CCU-680 EVDO USB card will be made available to us and then delivering revision A of EVDO.

I am also tinkering abit with the possiblity of bundling several EVDO/3G cards together and creating a faster link without having to have CAT telecom adding a multilink possibility on their service, and not only loadbalancing, but a true doubling of the bandwidth when using 2 cards.

Some keywords here, local multilink operating system capability, 3rd part site vpn server, vpn connection from local machine to 3rd party vpn multilink capable server.

On another note it is a real shame that CAT telecom will turn off this service, it really seems to cover alot of geographic area, more than in most other countries, many networks like this also seem to have alot of problems when delivering 3G to concrete buildings, but this does not seem to be true as much for CDMA2000-EVDO network in Thailand, though others might have made other observations in this regard.

But i can understand that they do it because customer support has been lukewarm, and also current development might be more narrowed into the UMTS-HSDPA path.

Specifically the turning towards UMTS-HSDPA is also more tuned into delivering service to urban areas with many users.

The physical infrastructure is already there though, and with their proposed joint-venture delivering UMTS-HSDPA together with DTAC will probably take advantage of the already existing towers and power cables.

Also this infrastructure will be a huge advantage when later building a WIMAX network, if there will be a WIMAX in the future of the Thai wireless experience.

They might have lost alot of money on this for now, but the investment should still hold for the wireless future, for quite some time.

The evolution of UMTS-HSDPA-HSUPA is called LTE, LTE is capable of delivering 100Mbps of download, this technology will be available to providers sometime in 2010.

UMB is an evolution of CDMA2000-EVDO and is the competitor of LTE, UMB technology is promising to deliver upto 280Mbps of download speed, but it seems to have lost market share, and providers now seem to be abit scared to going with this technology, which now seems to be a losing technology, which we are also seeing here in Thailand, with the fact that CAT telecom appears to be moving away from this technology.

UMB will however be available to customers already sometime in 2009, and Qualcomm might still turn their marketing machine around making this technology the winner, the future will be interesting indeed.

There are additional considerations aswell, one such consideration is the licensing of the technology, as per this date the WIMAX licensing is much cheaper than both LTE and UMB.

But wether or not this pays dividends for the developer remains to be seen, to keep up with development costs of future revisions might force the developers of WIMAX to raise their licensing costs for those future revisions.