Thailand ISP’s are throttling users use of the Internet, also called ‘Traffic Shaping’, particularly on access to sites like You Tube and Facebook and all International site access.
It has become so bad on You Tube with TOT, that with the supposedly 1Mbps upload speed, the most you can achieve to YouTube is less than 5Kbps, which means uploading a 60Mb viedo takes over 12 hours to upload. The download from YouTube is also ‘Traffic Shaped’ so that videos jerk, and stop/start because they cannot get the data fast enough.
TOT, 3BB and True are all ‘traffic shaping’, some more than others. From personal experience and investigations TOT has increased their ‘throttling’ considerably over the past few months.
There are three main issues here:
1. Do these ISP’s not realise that they are actually NOT reducing users use of the Internet, NOR are they reducing the load on their servers or making more bandwidth available to other users. A user that wants to upload a video of other things to other servers, is going to keep trying until they do, with the throttling in place this means that they get far more failures, the dropped packetes have to be re-transmitted until they get through and what would be over and done with in a few minutes is actually tieing up even more bandworth for many hours. If there was no throttling the files would be uploaded and the bandwidth available to other users much quicker.
2. The ISP’s advertise 16Mbps with 1Mbps upload, for around 1,400 Baht per month, and 10Mbps with 1Mbps upload for 590 Baht per month. It doesn’t matter which of the above you have you will NOT get what you pay for, and even more importantly you will only get around 5Kbps upload whether you have the 590 Baht or 1,400 baht service, The downloads being throttled too, means that you will get the same download speed for 590 bahts as you do for 1,400 bahts, So go for the cheapest option and you will have the maximum speed they will let you have. If you are accessing a site that is hosted in Thailand you may get better results as access to some of them is not throttled by the ISP’s.
3. The advertised speeds by the ISP’s are not real, they are fabricated by the ISP’s. They have all set up there own Speed Test Sites, and the servers they are hosted on have no throttling applied to them, so if you carry out a speedtest using one of them, you will appear to be getting the speeds they advertise. Very low practices indeed! Also some ISP’s have removed the throttling to some international speed test sites particulary those in LA, so that it appears they are giving faster speeds Internationally too!
This is not just happening in Thailand but in other Countries too, although possibly not to the same extent. Some ISP’s are playing the game and giving you what you pay for, for example Plusnet in the UK does no apparent throttling at all, you get what ever is available, NTL/Virgin however, are throttling your connection considerably, even though they ‘Offer’ the fastest speeds.
It is time that these ISP’s stopped throttling, and give the users what they pay for!
It is time for the laws to be changed to force IP’s (who are making billions out of us users) to stop ‘Traffic Shaping’ and make the Internet what it was designed to be FREE to everyone, and by FREE I don’t just mean FREE from payment to use it, but FREE of restrictions, such as throttling.
Whilst I realise it will never be totally FREE, as you wil always have to pay an ISP for the ‘door’ to access the FREE Internet, you should, at least get the speeds you are paying for without restrictions.
