TRIN TANTSETTHI / THAI-LANGUAGE PIONEER
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
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| Trin... foresees a major change again with wireless broadband. |
If it was not for a small group of early Internet pioneers who happened to be on the right mailing list at the right time, the way the Thai language was incorporated into Unicode would have required a major change in the way Thai is typed on a keyboard, according to Trin Tantsetthi, an early Thai-language pioneer, better known for his later role as president and CEO of Thailand's first ISP, Internet Thailand.
In the late 80s, Trin was working on language engineering with Digital Equipment Corp. This was Digital's first group that worked over the network and, among the seven or eight development teams, it was Trin's first experience of round-the-clock development.
"The sun would never set on our group, which was doing language from India to Indochina," he said.
In the 80s, Thailand had a variety of Thai-language character standards and even these were not strictly enforced. The industry had Kasetsart University's (KU), the Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TIS) and a variety of TIS plus extensions. It was a big headache.
Trin recalls that TISI had set up technical committee number 536, led by Kanchit Malaivongs, to fix the mess. This led to TIS-620 and it was adopted by the major PC companies, becoming the standard used until today.
"There was a fundamental change that happened with TIS-620 that made the industry grow. Before, people thought of Thai as a way to sell their own Thai language card. But with TIS-620, data could be send across applications and systems regardless of which Thai-language card was used," he explained, before adding that he was a big supporter of the open standards movement.
The next step after the character set was standardised was the way input was standardised. Nectec did a lot of work on this and submitted a draft standard to TISI that was never ratified. Today, Trin says that it is clear that Microsoft had adopted this draft in the way it handles the quirks of Thai language input.
The way that characters were input also almost underwent a big change at around this time with the adoption of Unicode.
"There was an effort by the linguists of the Unicode consortium to try and make Thai sort of like Indian. This would have changed the way we key words in," he said.
For instance, while Thai is generally a left to right language, some vowels, such as the A and O sounds, are typed before the consonant, while the AR, E and many others are typed after the consonant, regardless of where they are on paper.
The draft Unicode standard would have required input to always be in the form of consonant first, then vowel, with the vowel sometimes jumping to the left as needed. It would also require a cluster mark so that combined consonants were not inadvertently split up.
This, Trin pointed out, would have required a total re-training of the way Thai is keyed in and would have been very disruptive and it would also have needed an extra cluster key on the keyboard.
TISI led a team and fought for eight months with the Unicode consortium, with the outcome being that today's Unicode still works with the mechanical typewriter's order of input, he said.
It was through this work that Trin fell in love with the power of the Internet, which gave him the ability to form teams across continents and time zones, helping to save Thailand from a committee-designed standard that, while theoretically interesting, would not have worked.
"It was just by chance that someone was on the Unicode mailing list and had an interest in this. Otherwise, the next time we would have known would have been when the standard was put up for a vote, and TISI only had one vote out of 150."
From 1990 until 1996, Trin was a volunteer at Nectec, working on a number of network-related projects, including ITSC, the state enterprise pilot project under the Ministry of Science and Technology that was to later become Internet Thailand, Thailand's first ISP.
Trin pointed out that history will always note that CAT's very first licence went to ITSC and the second licence went to Assumption's KSC.
Internet Thailand was the very first joint venture between what was then the Telephone Organisation of Thailand and the Communications Authority of Thailand, breaking down decades of mistrust between the two organisations.
Today, Trin points to a distortion in the Internet service provider market. ISPs can buy bandwidth from only one source, CAT, which sells it for a very high price. Then, in order to make it affordable, they share the bandwidth and today the fan-out ratio of high-speed Internet in Thailand is among the worst in the world.
But rather than worry about how the National Telecommunications Commission's regulation on consumer protection may hurt the industry, he welcomed it.
"It is right that the NTC should regulate on quality for the interests of the consumer, and right now Internet quality in Thailand is terrible. Rather than compromise with the ISPs, they should force the ISP to provide a higher quality service. If they cannot, and have to raise prices, then so be it. The NTC needs to push the industry to breaking point, so that we can see the market distortions and how this price point is unsustainable," he said.
Trin puts this down to too few fibre cables running through Thailand and a lack of capacity planning by CAT.
He expects the market to undergo a major change again when wireless broadband is implemented, and urged the NTC to allow free and fair competition, rather than rule in favour of the wireline incumbents.
For the future, Trin sees a huge opportunity in southern China for Thailand. Today, the easiest way for Southern China to access the Internet would be through fibre coming down through Thailand, as it is cut off by mountains to the North-east. "The Taiwan earthquake also showed us the dangers of laying cable across an active fault line. If we can lay fibre to China, and then to the trans-Siberian railway and into Europe, this would be a huge economic driver. If Thailand wants to be a hub, this is our chance," he said.
The president of Internet Thailand also lashed out at the censorship and control culture of Thailand today. "We need to respect people and tap into the power of diversity; of different points of view. We need to trust the next generation to make the right decisions, not shield them from facts," he said.
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