tequila bomb

SPOILER : If you are in Thailand and want broadband internet, no matter how appealing True’s promotional material and offers appear, be aware that it is a trap. Go with another internet provider.

In fact, based on my experience over the last 6 years, I would advise you to avoid everything this company does. Avoid their mobile network. Avoid their satellite television service. Avoid their IPTV packages. And avoid their broadband internet.

In a nutshell : Avoid True like the plague.

It’s not that True’s internet is slow. All internet in Thailand is slow. It’s not that True’s infrastructure is unreliable. All infrastructure in Thailand is unreliable. It’s not that True’s connections are unstable. All connections in Thailand are unstable.

So, why should you avoid True? Well, because if you ever have a problem or issue, or try to get anything approaching the service you are actually paying for, you are going to be sorely disappointed.

Just to be clear. True are pretty much like any telco. They misrepresent what their services are capable of. That’s no problem, apparently. It should be. But in this day and age we are all wearily familiar with the lies that our service providers routinely spout.

It should also be noted that when True’s services work they are passable. Not great. But passable for a developing country with congested international pipes, an infrastructure put together on the cheap, and low paid miserable employees running it all.

The real problem, though, is that True have a totally blaze attitude towards customer service. They simply don’t care, or are so clueless about how to deal with customers as to have the same effect. True are unable to respond in any intelligent way to reasonable complaints, billing queries, service requests, or problems their customers are having.

And if you choose, out of desperation, to vote with the only option left to you and not pay bills, they will respond with threats and legal action, rather than constructive attempts to resolve their customer’s issue.

True’s method of doing business is in some ways a microcosm of many of the social and political problems that Thailand itself is facing today.

If I could draw cartoons I would draw an image resembling an infinite number of monkeys working on an infinite number of typewriters to describe the True Corporation. Except that given an infinite amount of time they still wouldn’t produce a copy of the works of Shakespeare. Nor would they achieve one cohesive sentence in all that frenetic typing.

Case 1 : Broadband Internet

About 6 years ago when I came to Thailand broadband was basically non-existent. In fact back then I was initially forced to use dial up to get online, even while living in the suburbs of Bangkok.

Around the time that consumer ADSL packages started becoming available here from a handful of internet providers. I first tried to choose a package from a company with offices in my local area : Jasmine Internet. Unfortunately as far as I could understand in those early days in Thailand, True Internet controlled the all important exchanges for my part of town, and refused to give Jasmine any access to that part of the infrastructure. So I was forced to go with True. Despite the fact that Jasmine’s service was coming from the same government controlled telecoms gateways as True’s, their offices being 5 minutes from me, and their packages being more attractive than True’s. I was left with no option but to go with the company that had installed the pipes in my area. Frustrating, but fair enough, I guess.

On the one had you can see why True would not want to help a competitor. But in most other countries this kind of monopoly on services, which is to the detriment of the consumer, would be offset by some kind of infrastructure sharing agreement (E.g. Like that forced on BT in the UK), which would be forced on providers by a benevolent government. In Thailand, however, things like that are millennia off. It is literally a foreign concept that will not take root here for a long time, if ever. And companies like True revel in this insanity.

For information on the madness behind the allocation of the Thai telecoms contracts there are many  good articles on the internet that will make your toes curl. Just google “Thailand 3G” for details on the current 3G farce that has been going on here for what seems like an eternity. When I read those it becomes very clear to me that the kind of unfair business model that is forced on all telecoms in Thailand by state controlled monopolies is mirrored in True’s attitude towards it’s own customers. The abused has truly become the abuser in True’s case. But that is really no excuse.

In my case I have watched as the internet here, as everywhere, has become saturated with users while telcos launch packages promising ever increasing speeds. All the time that telcos are doing this they are playing catch up with both local and international bandwidth off the back of the money raised from new customers. And all the while the stability of the internet speeds we receive fluctuates wildly.

On one occasion I questioned why my 1.5Mbps internet could only pull down data from overseas at a fraction of that speed. And the glib answer was that the connection speeds guaranteed by True, and others, were only “applicable inside Thailand”. It’s a laughable, but at least comprehensible, excuse.

Fast forward to today and I became aware that the monthly fee I was currently still paying each month entitled me to a speed (on paper) of 8Mbps. My actual speed was 3Mbps (again on paper). Both of those quoted speeds should be taken with a large pinch of salt though.

And forget verifying your speed with sites like speedtest.net. Results for those sites are cached in some way in Thailand, so as to give false readings. If you want to see how fast your internet really is then you need to conduct a download from a reliable source overseas that sends randomised and hash checked data. In short the internet speeds you see in Thailand are a complete facade even when they appear to work. Just try loading a niche web site compared to say the front page of CNN to get a feeling for what I mean.

This increase in package speeds does seem to have come about indirectly because of government intervention. The Thai government has insisted that internet service providers decrease the cost of internet for the masses. What the telcos decided to do instead though was to double or triple the speed of their packages across the board. Which was incredibly cheap for them to do as they simply changed their promotional material, and offered increased speeds they couldn’t possibly offer reliably when you consider that their current speeds didn’t work reliably anyway. This enabled them to “satisfy” a government directive on the surface of things, but maintain profits. While at the same time appear to be offering a great deal to new subscribers. New subscribers also get priority over existing ones when it comes to the higher speeds.

There is no relationship loyalty in Thailand in business either… Because of course, they didn’t actually tell existing customers about this, or even attempt to upgrade their packages. It was up to each customer to request this update. Partly because they are lazy and inept, but also because if they upgraded everyone the internet in Thailand would grind to a halt. Consequently any “upgrade” for an existing subscriber with True requires “processing”. Where as if I go into a shop and “sign up for a new connection” (their own words) I can have the increased speed today! You get the drift.

Earlier this month I contacted True and asked for my package to be brought in line with the fact that I had been paying three or four times what I should have been paying each month for the actual package I was still restricted to.

I was told it would take “4-7 days” for the upgrade to happen. So I waited. Knowing how things work here I waited 7 working days before I contacted them again to ask why I still had not seen a change in my package. I was then told it would take a further “2-3″ days. My upgrade was “in process” apparently. I didn’t even ask what that means. At the time I wondered if they needed to upgrade some piece of equipment in my area. But really suspected that it was simply something they needed to change in a database somewhere.

Another week passed and I contacted True’s customer service again to ask what the problem was once more. I was told my upgrade was “in process”. I requested a call back from someone who could tell me more, and was promised one that day.

Another week passed. Quite irritated at this point I pushed for more information, and again was promised a call back that day from a supervisor. I didn’t hold my breath.

Finally, about 24 after that, I set aside the time to sit on the phone with True Customer Service until I got a definitive answer. My ultimatum to the person I spoke to was that I either wanted my bill reduced today, or my package speed increased immediately. Otherwise I would cancel my contract, and curse their firstborn. (I am joking about the curse – but you can understand how frustrated I was at that point, I am sure!)

After about an hour on the phone, and what can only be described as a conversation that Monty Python would have been proud to have scripted, I got my answer.

Apparently my extremely old package, created when DSL was first available in Thailand, was inexplicably 9 baht (30 cents) lower than the price of the package they had suggested themselves that I could upgrade to for free.

They asked if I was willing to increase my monthly bill by 1% in order to have the package. Which I was, of course.

My problem with all this is why could I not have been told this on any one of the occasions I had contacted them over a period of 30 days. I did of course ask this, both in Thai and English just to be sure that the point got across, and the only reply was a rather meek apology.

In retrospect it’s a story I might find amusing one day. But in all seriousness, even discounting the real amount of time and stress this palaver cost me, I honestly think interactions with companies like this shorten your life span.

So far my “8Mbps” is performing at speeds which just about approach the bandwidth of the “3Mbps” package I was “upgraded” from. But that is an improvement, because my “3Mbps” package rarely got anywhere near the speeds it was supposed to furnish me with either.

Oh, and although the upgrade was “instant” once I agreed to the increase in my monthly bill, and I got a text on my phone in English and Thai telling me that I could now use my enhanced service “immediately”, it still took 24 hours for the speed increase to register on my router. This was despite rebooting it several times over the course of the day, just to see if I needed to do anything my end.

This is how it is day in and day out being a customer of True.

You literally pray you never have to contact them with a problem, or even a simple request.

Part 2 : Mobile Phones

My first mobile phone contract in Thailand was with True. Like many I fell for the commercial presence True has in the country. Which is pervasive.

For many years I knew no better than all cell phones in Thailand have patchy reception, drop signals frequently, and offer non-sensicle packages aimed at teenagers.

One month I got a bill for domestic mobile internet usage from True that came to over $1000 (My normal bill was about $10 – $15). Querying the bill, and after waiting an interminable time for a detailed breakdown I received a copy of my usage that showed I had downloaded the equivalent of a DVD in a little over 3 hours to my mobile phone.

To put this in perspective it was late 2006 and I was using a Palm Treo on a GPRS connection. This is before 3G had even been heard of in Thailand. After pointing out to True’s technical staff that the amount of data they alleged I had downloaded was a technical impossibility on their network, not to mention via my device, they still would not back down over the bill.

I voted with my feet and my wallet. I refused to pay the bill, and moved over to AIS.

I also sent them a registered letter detailing my reasons for disputing the bill, and explaining why I felt I had no other course of action left to me. Of course I never received a reply to that letter.

To this day I still get periodic legal threats from True over the outstanding funds. Oh, and before you ask I did pay for what I had used the month I cancelled, just less the crazy mobile internet overcharge.

By comparison I have had the same issue with AIS and GPRS twice in the last 3 years. On both occasions AIS listened to what I had to say, and even though on one occasion they asked me to pay the bill before they investigated, I always got credited with the amount that they had overcharged me for, eventually, one way or another.

What’s more the staff I spoke to at AIS seemed to be actively invested in solving my issue, and called me back when they promised.

Part 3 : Satellite TV / IPTV

Back in the day True’s satellite TV service was called UBC. It offered some of the most basic and low quality feeds from the likes of Star Sports, BBC World Service programming, Hallmark etc. All of the most basic programming that is on low budget satellite packages in most other countries. Not “premium” up to date programming that you would expect from the country’s one and only “premium” satellite TV provider.

UBC also chose to use frequencies for their satellite signal which are susceptible to interference from bad weather. In a country that has regular, and extensive rainy seasons!

For this patchy, ad-laden programming they charged a package price annually which would easily cover both my BBC license fee and a subscription to Sky in the UK. What’s more UBC would block adverts that it did not get a kick back from so that we had to watch a static test card during advert breaks. I hate adverts. But having a test card several times throughout fuzzy low quality movies, which have been chopped down to the length of in-flight movies is irritating. What is even more irritating is if during movies, or live sporting events the morons in the control room forget to turn the test card off after the adverts!

A long while back I ditched UBC/True as the way I get TV here (primarily due to Star Sports absolutely lousy Formula 1 coverage). And now use other perfectly legal means of getting content from the UK and the US for far less money, in better quality, and with more freedom and choice. If anyone in Thailand wants to know about the services I use then please do contact me.

In recent years True has continued with its terrible satellite packages, actually downgrading what was once known as the Gold Package, and introducing a Platinum Package. In a business strategy that is typical to True, the Platinum Package was/is (it’s been a while since I checked) the Gold Package with a few extra throw away channels, and the same bandwidth shared between that increased number of channels. The Gold Package actually got downgraded, but the price remained the same, and existing customers who wanted the same programming they had last year had to upgrade and pay more!

In conclusion I genuinely feel sad for Thailand the country, and its people that this kind of business is able to not only survive here, but actually thrive. And I don’t see things changing any time soon.

Eight years ago, Balsam was working as a marketer when he received one too many e-mail pitches to enlarge his breasts.

Enraged, he launched a website called Danhatesspam.com, quit a career in marketing to go to law school and is making a decent living suing companies who flood his e-mail inboxes with offers of cheap drugs, free sex and unbelievable vacations.

Balsam settles enough lawsuits and collects enough from judgments to make a living. He has racked up well in excess of $1 million in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies accused of sending illegal spam.

This guy is my hero. More power to him.

If only we could apply the same principals to TV adverts, excruciating-ly banal product placement strategies, telemarketers and bulk snail-mail.

This is a strong indication that the company is ready and willing to cut sites off if the law should demand it. It also raises the prospect that MasterCard could cut sites off even without a legal requirement to do so. The company recently came under fire from Anonymous over its decision to cease processing payments for WikiLeaks, something it was under no legal obligation to do.

It is amazing that it’s taken the various interested parties so long to think of this. But when they saw how quick financial institutions were to react to edicts to shut down payments to Wikileaks they must have thought all of their Christmas’s had come at once. MasterCard, Visa and most banking institutions are all too happy to take money from any source, it seems, until some pressure is applied. But then it’s not such a huge surprise to any of us that these organisations have very few moral ethics in reality.

Increasingly the way to deal with anything that does not fit with the ideals of big business or government is to “Send them to Coventry” with varying degrees of severity. Unfortunately, this is how we fracture societies, breed resentment, and ultimately end up with fringe groups with nothing to lose.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What’s more, we now have Bank of America who will face some embarrassing revelations in the New Year (courtesy of Wikileaks) unilaterally, and completely coincidentally of course, trying to nobble their cash flow.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

The companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included a PowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source.

The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price.

Expect more initiatives like this. And not just in the US.

It’s been said a few times this week, but it bears repeating…

As far as the law of contract is concerned, Amazon can do what it likes. But this isn’t just about contracts any more. “While Amazon was within its legal rights,” MacKinnon warns, “the company has nonetheless sent a clear signal to its users: if you engage in controversial speech that some individual members of the US government don’t like… Amazon is going to dump you at the first sign of trouble.”

Yep. For years people have extolled cloud computing as the way of the future. The lesson of the last week is simple: be careful what you wish for.

I for one will not be using Amazon’s services at all in the forseeable future. Any of them.

In any case, I have not been a fan of the movement to shift to “The Cloud’ for some time. Before Wikileaks my reasons were simply to do with the limitations of bandwidth that we all still face unless we live right slap bang in the middle of a major city.

But now I have another reason; Amazon (and their ilk) cannot be trusted.

Some of the largest European telecoms—including France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Vodafone—have been complaining in recent months that as wireless data use increases, popular websites like Google, Yahoo, and others are using their networks “for free.”

Last time I checked I pay for any wireless service in my device or service providers package. Is wireless internet free in Europe now?

And I may be confused, but I already pay for the bandwidth that serves up this web page. Perhaps the telcos should talk to Data Centers and other ISPs as well.

I would have far more sympathy with these idiots if they were just honest, admitted they’d had a drink or two in the boardroom and came up with the great idea that they’d like to get paid twice. Wouldn’t we all!

“Currently about 40 percent of our expenses go to networks anyway,” Giuseppe de Martino, the legal and regulatory director of Dailymotion, told Bloomberg. “If telecom operators want us to share in their expenses, perhaps we should talk about sharing subscription revenues as well.”

Exactly.

• The US has welcomed the arrest of Assange. “That sounds like good news to me,” said Robert Gates US defence secretary. “The international manhunt for Julian Assange is over,” NBC television declared.

• The WikiLeaks crisis is holding back talks on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak.

5.30pm: With perfect timing an email arrives from Philip Crowley at the state department:

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host Unesco’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from 1-3 May in Washington, DC.

Ironic? Read the next paragraph from the press release:

The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

Shameless. You really could not make it up.

The entire entry from The Guardian is a great timeline of yesterdays events related to Wikileaks and Julian Assange’s arrest.

Two articles you should read about Wikileaks…

The first is an Op-Ed by Assange himself for The Australian…

I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

The second is from The Guardian…

On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

In many ways I now find Clinton far more distasteful than Palin.

And Obama, well he promised great things, and to date has only disappointed… the entire world.

With current addresses due to run out in 2012, nations and businesses must get on with switching. During the switch internet links could become unreliable, making sites and services hard to reach, Mr Cerf said.

As parts of the internet do eventually convert to IPv6 those trying to get at the parts still on IPv4 may not reach the site, resource or service they were after.

The net would not stop during the switch, said Mr Cerf, but access could get “spotty”.

That instability could last years, he suggested, as even search giant Google – his current employer – took three years to get its IPv6 network up and running.

Troubled times ahead.

The key to accelerating the shift to IPv6 would be making internet service providers (ISPs) offer the service to their customers, he said, something too few were doing at the moment.

ISPs do not typically operate in the same sanity bubble, let alone reality, as the rest of us. That I fear, is the real problem that the internet and its citizens face during this time.

Typically the internet, and the technology community in general, tends to find solutions to these problems in good time. Patches, workarounds, or even sometimes miracles of brilliance appear and plug the leaky damn in the eleventh hour. Some problems even go away seemingly all by themselves.. The “Year 2K Bug”, anyone? But ultimately many of these possible solutions are let down by implementation, because of industry concerns over ownership of pipes and technology, and who ultimately foots the bill for it all. Oh, and how they can profit – while doing as little as possible.

You went to bed and all was well in the blogOsphere.

The next morning your admin account goes straight to the WSOD. The only person messing with your server in the meantime was Plesk and its nightly backup and maintenance gremlins.

You’ve tried all the usual solutions found with a search on Google for “WordPress WSOD”. Including restoring your database from a backup. But nothing is working.

There is a growing pile of hair around the legs of your chair.

If you haven’t tried this yet… Give it a go…

Expand a fresh archive of the same version of wordpress that you have into your site’s root directory. (One level above your actual WordPress install.)

“mv” all the core WordPress folders out of your broken website.

“mv” fresh ones in from the expanded archive.

**I actually tried this originally about 48 hours ago, but only with the wp-admin folder. In my case however, the wp-includes folder was also broken in some way.

What would be nice to know is how did the files or folders of a part of my server I never have cause to visit get borked?

Great timing over the days directly after an Apple event though!

** I also tried a full restore of my website from a full Plesk domain backup. It seems that Plesk doesn’t always overwrite things properly. As that should have surely solved my problem also. It might possibly not be Plesk’s fault if something really strange had happened to my website file system. But it would be nice if Plesk’s GUI driven backup system was not almost entirely mute and retarded when it comes to communicating with a user. And don’t get me started on the CLI and its mapping file nonsense.

Have the guys at Parallels ever actually had to restore a website backup I wonder?