Skip to main content

Bangkok Metro Wai-Fi

While many cities have already dabbled with, and in many cases shutdown, city WiFi projects Bangkok is just rolling theirs out.

The speeds will be low, around the 64K mark, as the service is designed to allow employees to check their email and use IM.

This is all in an effort to give people an alternative to the daily commute in the time of high fuel prices, lack of supply for NGV cars (Taxis) and the general congestion problems on the capital's roads.

Having worked from home on ADSL and dealing with large attachments typically sent my email today the low speed will be impacting on adoption.

Overall I wish the operator every success but feel that the service is doomed from the start. The main concern is how much business, even general business, can be conducted in a hands off approach in Thailand. The Wai is still a powerful sales and business tool. Face-to-face meetings will continue to be the core of the decision making process and distance from the Pu Yai's office ties in with a circle of ever-decreasing power and responsibility.

Bangkok will be truly ready for WiFi when business society is ready for Wai-less working.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

PC over IP - The Teradici Effect

Teradici are hoping to blur the lines between PC and Data Centre. Their solution allows a use to view multiple screens and control the blade PC over IP. This is kind of like the dumb terminals with a new edgy deployment. The intention is that all of the computing power is performed offsite in a centralized area, the Data Centre, and this will save on power and maintenance costs as the engineers are co-located with the hardware and therefore don't have to go out to the client site for basic maintenance. The Teradici Company Article found in the Wall Street Journal

In the overlap of technology, marketing and social media the QR Code is critical

Outside of consulting on telecommunications, CIO advisory, and the business adoption of technology I also completed an MBA.  One of the projects was on the potential use cases of two dimensional barcodes. Today the QR Code , one of many types of 2D codes, is seen as being a critical component of any good marketing plan.  As a natural integration between social media and devices I would extend VMob Bob's question " What can a mobile operator learn from Facebook ?" and also ask how can they step and start to make innovations with the extensions to social media that already exist today?

Access as infrastructure, what does this mean for Telco 2.0?

Having recently attended a seminar by Catherine Middleton from Ryerson on Australia's NBN initiative it got me thinking about "access as infrastructure". The Australian Government is investing $B's of public and private capital in a national broadband network that is a fibre to the premise platform, although for distant and remote sites it will most likely be a fixed wireless solution.  The proposition from Dr. Middleton is that ubiquitous access will create a platform for services that separates competition from access, sounds like Telco 2.0. The question I posed was if the idea is a common platform but close to 10% of that access will be at 12Mbps rather than 100Mbps (fixed wireless versus fibre) then surely the lowest common denominator will prevail and services will be designed for 12Mbps.  You would then question the rationale of FTTP or FTTH when you could go fixed wireless.  Over time LTE and similar technologies will see an increase in speed that will of...