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eleco Tro bles?t'sTrickier inThailand

By Carl Malamud

Lwaiting for three year .

The ba ic problem here eem obvi­ou : There are not enough phone line .The telephone company it elf concede ahortfall of everal million line . Wor e,

only a mall percentage of the demandwill be met in the next few year .

If you do have a telephone, you'llfind that the local office witche are 0

overloaded that performance tarts at er­ratic and become progre ively morechaotic. Bu y ignal imply mean thatyour call did not go through, not that thephone i engaged at the other end. Dialtone aren't alway real: You've got to lis­ten carefully to ee if you have an er atzdial tone coming from orne phantom cen­tral office witch.

Lea ed line are even wor e. Oneprominent multinational company pay

,000 per month for a 9,600-kbitl linkto Hong Kong, the company's greate tingle expen e in A ia. For it money,

the company get a line guaranteed to goout at lea t five time per day. I at downwith the network manager once andwatched 37 outage in a ingle day. Al­though it' impo ible to get the phonecompany to confirm it, mo t of the out­age eem to be cau ed in the 10 al loopon the Thai end.

All of these problem can beshrugged off a inconveniences-under­tandabl one given Thailand' tatu a

an emerging nation-but they're lethal tobusine .

veral corporate executive doingbu ine in Thailand ay the lack of a uit­able infra tru ture ha delayed expan ionplan ,and a few indicate they are hiftingtheir focus to countries uch a Malay iawhich ha , comparatively, an excellent

infra tructure).Why can't th government get the

infrastructure in place? One reason iimply that the rapid growth of the Thai

economy caught planner by urpri e.Another is the Thai aver ion to taking on

DATA COMMUNICATIONS OJULY 19900 %7

before making data calls to find out whichnumber are available.

Of course, if you live in Thailand,having many phone number i the1 s of your problems. The ait to put ina plain 0 an 10 line can ea ily tr tchover year . The r omm nd d pro duri to pay a "nonrefundable ca h depo it"of 60,000 baht ( 2,250, or two to threetime the monthly salary of many employ­ee ), which cut the lead time to ixmonth or o. I know a guy who won'tpay a a matter of principle; he' been

pretty much comes down to iteration orintuition, with few other choice inbetween.

The X.25 network, Thaipak, ha aimilar etup. The packet a embler/di­

a embler in Bangkok include 30 differ­ent phone numbers. The chance of anyparticular number working for two con­ecutive day i omething on the order

of a minor miracle. In fact, I know onegentleman who call up the ervice de k

ong lead time for dedicatedline got you down? Or i itjust that your packet-for­warding rate are a taduboptimal?

rious problem , nodoubt about it. But the next time you feellike launching into a litany of complaintsabout your telecommunication trouble,count to 10 and con ider orne of yourcolleague over ea .

I recently got back from Thailand,where I wa helping a nonprofit develop­ment group in Bangkok set up an MIS de­partment. The organization has 600 em­ploye on 16 ite and, when I got there,wa running 16 pes and an antiquatedIBM y tem/36. (They still are, but that'another tory.) In the course of my work,though, I learned to appreciate the tele­communication climate in the Unitedtate.

Take plain old telephone . The con­cept of a main number for a busine s ifairly new in Bangkok. The Nation, a lead­ing Engli h-language new paper, i li tedthi way in the phone book: "The ation,59 Soi aengchan Sukhumvit, 392-<>050-8,or call 391-7172, 390-2607, 391-1004, orcall 392-0994, 392-2557-8."

That' ju t for tarter: The real in­formation overload come with bu inecard . Th . often Ii t a dozen phonenumber for peo Ie to try, along with faxnumber . There i n' uch room left for-mail addre e.

They're all functioning num nth witchboard, by the way. If you get abu y ignal, youju t keep trying the alter­native . Aredial button doe n't help here,in it trie the arne number over andv r.

One way to get ar und th probl mi to have your cretary keep trying thenumbers in ucce ion. Another ap­proach i to try to figure out which num­b rs hav the best chance of being free atany given time, a kind of minilottery. It

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Carl , a contributing edi or ofDATA COMMU ICATIO ,i a fo m r col­umnist with the Bangkok Post. He hasmade numerous trip to Thailand re­searching the computer indu try.

up with orne novel capital-rai ingchemes. For example, vendors in talling

telephone ystems are required to fi­nance the co t of new equipment, whichthen become government property.Even u er are a ked to pay capital costs:Getting an X.25 connection, for example,u ed to mean renting a sub tandard mo-

debt. There is a government-wide annualdebt limit of 1.2 billion per year, whichcover all government expenditure , in­cluding long-term bond . It only take acouple of road or ewage projects to eatup that limit.

To get around the problem, the Tele­phone Organization of Thailand has come

dem from the Communication Authorityof Thailand and then supplementing itwith one that worked.

Amore serious hindrance to expand­ing the infrastructure i the extent of cor­ruption in government procurement. Thestandard under-the-table fee i at least 10percent of the value of the contract.

--------------------------------1 There have been several instances oflarge procurements being delayed be­cau e the variou parties could not agreeon how to split up these "commis ion ."The way U.S. companies get aroundthese prohibition i to ell to a "VAR"who take care of the e details. The VARis often a one-man operation, sometimesa former government official working outof a ba ement.

Sadly, for those doing business inthe Third World, thi ituation may oundlike old hat. The real trouble comes whena country uch a Thailand begin posi­tioning it elf a an IC, or newly indu tri­alized country, in the same league aHong Kong, Singapore, or Taiwan. Keybusiness leader in Asia were hot on Thaipro pects a few years ago. The lack of aninfrastructure, however, i making manyof them re-evaluate their originalenthu ia m.

That's not to say that it i impo ibleto do good work in Thailand. There arehighly competent business executivesand even a few successful data proce s­ing projects. The prime minister' adviso­ry council, for example, has a modem PC­ba ed network. Of course, one of theprime minister's key adviser concededto me that a significant portion of the soft­ware wa bootlegged.

Still, succes es are few and far be­tween. High import duties on computerequipment, government corruption, lackof copyright protection for oftware, andan inadequate telecommunication infra­structure have all retarded the growth ofthe local data proce ing indu try.

W111 it change? I don't know. As onelong-term resident of Thailand told me,"Mter 20 years in Bangkok, if omebodytold me their telephone jumped off thetable, ran over, and lapped them in theface, I wouldn't be urprised.".