The 3G saga continues... for the worse | Bangkok Post: tech

OPEN Thought

It has been more than a month now since Thailand joined the civilised world when the Turtlephone Organisation of Thailand launched its 3G network in Bangkok and the surrounding areas. I signed up one day after launch. So, how has the experience been? How is the network? How is the customer service and billing?

ToT did not launch its 3G on the 1900 MHz band, a North-American standard, essentially reusing its GSM 1900 bands. Now, while it may be called "1900", the band actually overlaps both with "1800" and "2100". As it turned out, ToT 3G is launched on the 2100 band, where it owns 15 MHz, or three 5 MHz channels.

What does this mean? Well, first that virtually all 3G phones will work as it is the standard 3G frequency and not the oddball North American frequency they were using on GSM. It also means that by moving out of the 1900 MHz band, they have freed up a slice on the top of 1800 which lies unused.

It also means that ToT has got valuable spectrum for free. The NTC auction for 3G licenses was mulling a 15 MHz license at 5.2 billion baht and a 10 Mhz license at 4.6 billion baht as a starting price for the auction.

The original plan from years and years ago was for ToT to launch 3G on 2100 and the 1900 was a stop-gap measure while 3G matured. Well, they certainly took their time.

So, now that they have had a generation to prepare, how is their network?

Most networks in the west have evolved from a 384 KBPS network to 2.6 MBPS HSPA (high speed packet access) to today's 7.2 and 14.4 MBPS HSPA. Most networks are now beginning to roll out 21 MBPS HSPA+ (64 QAM) and some even 28.8 MBPS DCHSPA. ToT has gone with what is probably the vanilla standard of yesterday with 7.2 MBPS down and 2 MBPS up.

Speed with a 7.2 (down) / 5.6 (up) MBPS Huawei E176 is perfectly decent with 3-4 MBPS at my home with 3 to 4 bars of signal - well, at least until lots of people use the network.

Maybe it is the lack of base stations (ToT has only 548 around greater Bangkok. Starhub in Singapore has 2,500 for a much denser, smaller population) but I feel that ToT Mobile should rename their service ToT Nomadic as the user experience is nothing but mobile.

Walking around in an area with less than four out of five bars of signal strength is not a good idea for video or audio. For in-car use, forget high speed data - even voice calls are often dropped when driving around. In-building coverage is quite bad too, but for different reasons. Lack of in-building cells mean that often I get four or five bars of coverage when on a high floor in a building, but cannot access the Internet at all due to WCDMA "breathing" interference.

As an industry vendor told me, telcos who thought they could reuse most of their GSM cells for WCDMA layout would be in for a nasty surprise.

So, the speeds are decent, quite good even. Latency, measured to Bangkok servers, suffers from too much jitter, varying from around 80 to 140 milliseconds. That is a problem, as many real-time protocols such as games and VoIP struggle once you get past 100ms. DTac's test 3G network is much better in this respect, with latency of around 70 to 80 most of the time. A good 3G network should have around 50 millisecond latency to local servers, so both obviously have some network optimisation homework to do.

The nice thing is that ToT 3G's speeds are subject to much less packet-shaping than, say, a True ADSL line and, away from the benchmarks, the user experience is nicer than going through copper. That makes for an odd situation where it becomes the premium connection and ADSL the cheap and cheerful one, precisely the reverse of the norm in the West. How this will bode for network traffic and expansion might turn out to be quite unique and problematic for many telcos.

Now, for the bad news. ToT 3G is, to my knowledge, the only telco in the world that requires you to sign up for a 12-month contract for a SIM-only deal. Yes, in the west they hold you to 18 or even 24 months but at least they provide a free or almost-free phone with the package.

The biggest package they have is 6GB of data a month for 799 baht for contract; or 1,000 Baht a gigabyte for pre-paid data. Now, this is where the fun starts.

I have been very patient with Turtlephone and given them the benefit of the doubt. Obviously there are some teething troubles when a medieval bureaucracy actually, gasp, does something after a decade of planning in committees and sub committees, but even five weeks after launch, their customer service system still cannot access their billing system.

Word has it that the billing system contractor is too busy playing golf near Rangsit University.

The network was launched on Dec 3 and I got my Sim one day later, but it wasn't activated until Dec 9. Worse, even one month later, the call centre cannot tell me how much data I have used so far. While they did ask for a contact number to get back to me, the person only managed to explain how to look at my data counter on Windows or on my Nokia phone and told me I had to note down on a piece of paper how much I use each day. They also suggested I stop calling every day to ask billing questions.

Now, that would almost be a passable solution if it were not for the fact that phones and PCs do crash or run out of battery from time to time, losing the data count, and even more so when using power-hungry 3G data applications.

It is incredible that it is up to the subscriber to monitor his own usage this way or risk the heavy penalties that come from using too much data. How heavy? 2,000 baht a gigabyte for anything beyond what is included in the package. Surely not being able to provide an indication of use contravenes some national telecommunications commission or Ministry of Commerce rule or regulation with regards service levels and billing best practices?

Right now, I really have no idea how much data I have used. That first bill has not arrived in the post and I fear it may be a whopper with all the broadcasting and testing I have done. I can envision myself in court defending myself against a 100,000 baht ToT bill on grounds that I have repeatedly tried to ask how much I have used but it is ToT's fault that they could not tell me so that I could have moderated my usage.

Live billing is not cheap and requires hefty computer hardware. Indeed, all the major telcos use HP Superdomes with more than 100 Itanium CPUs for their billing systems. Some legacy providers run batch billing every few days and provide an estimate for their CRM (customer relationship management) systems when someone calls the call centre.

ToT has no such excuse. Not only is it not burdened with a legacy billing system (unless it bought an old legacy system new for this new project), it should have lots of spare cash considering it did not have to pay billions for its license.

ToT has five MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) partners that run virtual networks on top of their network. In these early days, they have not managed to provide any real competition as pricing is all but identical. The only difference is the colour of the logo on the Sim. Network coverage and speed of course is the same as it is the same network.

All in all, it is a depressing start to what could have been a much brighter future. Competition is needed in 3G and many frustrated early adopters would be more than happy to forego a one-year contract if it means a decent customer call centre that can tell how much has beeb used and a network that allows for mobile use, on the move.

But we will not have competition until we have 3G licensing and increasingly it seems that we will not have 3G licensing until the 2G concession/joint-venture mess has been sorted out first.

The saga continues.