Last one in, again | Bangkok Post: tech

YEAR IN REVIEW: THAILAND

Never in Thai history has a story that didn't happen so dominate the news and clearly emerge as the Technology Story of the Year; just before the New Year, your TOT flipped a switch that started providing bandwidth of the third-generation kind in a couple of obscure corners of Bangkok, but in truth, 2009 was the year that Laos and Cambodia totally humiliated the telecoms state enterprises by leaving Thailand a far, distant last among Asian countries providing 3G service to yuppiephone subscribers.

In late November 2009, TOT Corporation claimed it had launched a 3G phone service, making Thailand once again as advanced as Laos and as technologically capable as Cambodia.

Okay, you should have a cellar of salt handy, but information specialists Research and Markets made this prediction: There will be 87.3 mobile phone subscribers in Thailand within four years, but the market share of Advanced Info Service will shrink to "only" 41.4 percent of them - 36.1 million users.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva called up Information and Communications Technology Minister Ranongruk Suwanchwee on one of those old, yucky 2G phones and asked her to drop by for a chat about the progress she is making on installing spiffy new third generation (3G) networks; Mrs Ranongruk was thrilled to tell the PM that her husb... that she had organised TOT Corp to have some 3G connections by Dec 16, funded locally for 20 billion baht, and she was right; no one really wanted a service that worked in a few locations in Bangkok, but she was right.

For those with no contestant in the dogfight around 3G, it was marvellous entertainment watching the powers that be think up new reasons for not simply going ahead with a minor - if important - upgrade to the telecoms system; it was all in the name of trying to save the overcooked bacon of your TOT and your CAT Telecom, neither of which have a smidgin of hope of survival according to their current business plans; after the Magnificent Seven of the National Telecommunications Commission dillied and dallied over when and how to have an auction, after the best minister of information and communications technology of the entire year bent to the task, after Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva promised and unpromised 3G service and bandwidth auctions within 2009, finally Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij spilt the beans: There will be no 3G service, no auction until after the private companies agree to sign new contracts allowing your TOT and your CAT Telecom to continue skimming their gross revenues in the system euphemistically known as concessions; TOT and CAT are to continue to operate a duopoly without the messy bit about actually providing any service of their own.

Your CAT Telecom claimed huge success for 2008 but the figures actually showed how weak it is, because more than half of the money in all categories now comes from concession fees.

Information and Communications Technology Minister Ranongruk Suwanchwee said TOT is expected to call for international bids for procurement of goods needed to build a nationwide 3G network in April; everyone knows the dependability and credibility that Mrs Ranongruk has established in a mere one year on the job; mean-spirited people, however, claimed that certain well-placed politicians might be planning to take a piece of the procurement bid, and they should be ashamed of themselves for having such thoughts.

Since there is no pressure on Thailand to be first or even second-last in Southeast Asia to get third-generation yuppiephone service, the head of the National Telecommunications Commission urged everyone to slow down and listen to all opinions on the subject; the important thing, said chairman Gen Choochart Promprasit, is to get it right

Your TOT and your CAT Telecom heavily criticised Mr Korn for his announcement of a 90-day 3G moratorium while negotiations on new concessions contracts take place; oh, bragged your TOT board chairman Teerawut Boonyasophon, it will take way, way longer than that, because this concessions stuff is complicated.

Censorship was her chief goal when she was sworn in, and Information and Communications Technology Minister Ranongrak Suwanchwee proved ever so good at it; after she was shunted into the job because she was unqualified to be commerce minister, Mrs Ranongruk, who is totally independent politically and is not influenced in any manner by her politically banned husband Mr Pairoj, said she wanted more websites found and blocked for lese majeste; her predecessor Mun Patanotai banned a mere 1,200-plus websites in a secretive operation, although the list is now widely available and the sites are widely popular; Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) announced that by February, less than two months into Mrs Ranongruk's crusade, the number of banned and blocked websites had grown to more than 50,000 - 17,775 by the fabulous Minister of Information and Communication Technology and the rest by police, mostly from the days of military rule; FACT offered links to "free, legal circumvention" software to set up virtual private networks (VPN) to bypass the ever-building great firewall of Thailand at facthai.wordpress.com.

Information and Communication Technology Minister Ranongruk Suwunchwee told credulous media that there had been 2,300 websites banned only, but also bragged that she "removes content" before bothering to get a court order; she also revealed a US law that no one has heard of that bans Al-Qaeda and other terrorist material on the Internet; she also explained that "the kids" use one of those, er, webcom thingmys to show their bottom half, and also have sex through a webcom; she's a minister and she knows about this stuff.

Police raided Prachatai.com and seized servers and computers in an investigation of lese majeste allegations; officers explained that the website may have failed to delete possible lese majeste entries in less than the allotted one-millisecond; when they left they also took along Cheeranuch Premchaiphorn, the webmistress, on charges of disseminating lese majeste content from Oct 15 to Nov 3 of 2008 - and took along all files from her personal computer as well; Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said that sympathy was in short supply this year, and explained that Ms Cheeranuch had the constitutional right to complain if she thought the Crime Suppression Division police did a nasty.

Mrs Ranongruk was quite proud of all this, one of the reasons the nation celebrated her tenure as by far the best minister of information and communications technology in all of 2009; she explained she had a 45 million baht ICT "war room" where her gnomes surf the web 24/7 looking for violators; she warned her counterparts at the justice, interior and defence ministries that they had better step up their efforts against all that lese majeste that is going on, lest someone accuse them of lacking loyalty; the minister's policy statement lacked any mention of education, promoting knowledge or help to bring information technology to more people.

In addition to more censorship, said Anuparb Thiralarp, a telecoms expert, Mrs Ranongruk should commit to making your TOT and your CAT Telecom stronger, and stop then from shrinking in a competitive market; the minister realised that she had more important duties; by September, her propaganda officials announced she had blocked more than 17,000 of the worst websites, and was still furiously working on it.

Suwicha Thakhor became the first casualty of the controversial Computers Crimes Act when the Criminal Court sentenced him to 20 years for posting an altered and defamatory photo of His Majesty the King on his blog; a weeping Suwicha was hauled away after the court reduced the prison term to 10 years in exchange for his guilty plea; he would have faced a maximum sentence of 15 years if he had been charged with lese majeste, but police filed four separate charges for four separate photos, and each carried a maximum sentence of five years.

The webmaster of (exteen.com) blog was summoned by police, twice, for interrogation over a comment that might have been offensive; it was posted almost two years before Suppression Division police arrested broker-friendly Thiranant Wipuchanin and Katha Pajajiriyapong for using their computers to spread rumours about the health of His Majesty the King in the infamous Stock Exchange of Thailand manipulation of mid-October; it was the most egregious use known of the Computer Office Act of 2007, which has been used to block tens of thousands of websites for "offences" like criticising the government, and for jailing people who accessed nasty videos on YouTube.

The government admitted that more than two years and 972 million baht later, authorities never even turned on the thousands of surveillance cameras installed to monitor, catch and defeat the insurgents in the South. Security forces in the South were shocked that "high-technology" GT200 witching sticks bought for 700,000 baht apiece during the days of the military junta to detect bombs have done little to detect bombs, prevent bombings or catch bombers; the dowsing sticks peddled successfully by the Electronic K9 company of Singapore and exposed worldwide as nothing but ouija "technology" capable of picking up the operator's prejudices, have resulted in several spectacular failures, aka bombings and deaths; on the other side, people have been arrested because of the supposed presence of bomb material on their bodies, equally false readings.

Two weeks after the army announced that terrorists in the South were switching from mobile phones to other types of remote controls to set off their bombs, the military announced it would purchase new, updated and more expensive equipment to jam mobile phones; this time, the jammers come from Japan at a cost of (cough)1.5 million baht(cough) apiece; you should be ashamed for what you're thinking right now, the leaders of the armed forces have absolutely no motive but pure national security and the idea of a kickback on such equipment is hateful thought.

Out of a trillion baht poured into 6,000 stimulus projects in the aggressive and populist government plans covering infrastructure, public transport, water resources management, public health facilities, education and tourism not one, not one satang and not a single project involved technology or telecommunications. The National Telecommunications Commission ordered all mobile phone companies to institute number-portability, to allow telephone subscribers to keep the same number when they switch services from, say, Company A to Company D; but there was no hurry, the companies have only had since 2002 to get ready, and you can't switch and keep your number until, oh, maybe in the next year sometime; or so.

The long-heralded Asia-America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable operators announced in August that they were finally ready to turn on power; the fibre-optical link stretches from Hawaii to Southeast Asia, touching in eight countries including Thailand; the switch was thrown in December, with the potential to increase Internet bandwidth by, well, a magnitude, but it didn't; one reason no one noticed increased bandwidth: the Thai partner is CAT Telecom.

Morakot was no Emerald; it was an ill wind that whipped up seas and cut or damaged six separate fibre-optic cables carrying Internet traffic to Thailand; the typhoon itself never hit Thailand, but while it killed an estimated 500 Taiwanese, Morakot caused deep-sea landslides that severed three cables and disrupted three others, including the SWM-3 (Southeast Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3) and both APCN (Asia Pacific Cable Network) that carry Internet and telephone traffic to and from Thailand; the Net slowed noticeably, but picked up after a couple of days when engineers managed to quickly repair the APCN2 cable between Singapore and Malaysia, while traffic was re-routed to other systems.

More than 80,000 workers lost their jobs in the electronics and electrical industry at the low point of the recession; job recovery began in September when big companies including hard-drive maker Seagate began calling workers back to the factories.

"The frustration grows," headlined newspapers, as Information and Communications Technology Minister Ranongruk Suwanchwee was near tears, almost stamping her foot in frustration trying to detect "which satellite Thaksin is using" to speak to his red-shirt loyalists, because she really wants to cut the call; that raised the question of which is scarier: hearing the Thaksin speeches or having a technology minister who thinks the Internet runs on satellites.