Internet in Thailand can only be described as unsatisfactory, at least from my experience. I have spent a lot of time in Thailand over the last couple of years and I have had some dreadful experiences using the internet. However, the experiences are my own and do not necessarily apply to the whole of Thailand but just the places that I have been.

The first internet problem I had was that my credit card details were taken probably in a Bangkok internet cafe with logging hardware that recorded all my keystrokes. I tried to pay my dental bill and the card did not work. It transpired that the details had been stolen and that goods had been billed to the card in London, England. But the credit card company said that the details were stolen in Thailand (the only place I had used it).

This theft of credit card details is not a comment on the quality of Thai internet but just some back ground information which may be of interest to the reader. Never enter your password or username for your bank details in an internet cafe in Thailand. The key logger technology can be either hardware or software, and is very easy to install or attach. It is very hard to discover as well.

I stayed in Nakhon Nayok for a period of a few weeks with my Thai girlfriend last year and something happened to a cable and the whole town was without any LAN internet for six – yes six! – days. Now in my country if that happened there would be a revolution but in Thailand it did not seem to be much of a worry to the locals. All four of the town’s internet cafes were shut down for most of this period.

In Bangkok, there are constant and unending problems using the internet. For example, in my apartment there is internet provided. But it is often very slow, or not working. In fact, I have had tests run outside Thailand and one of the problems is that my Thai computer which I use in the apartment in Bangkok is cycling through IP (internet protocol) addresses; as many as 25 in a day. This IP problem means that I can not access certain sites that I need to go to.

A recent experience in a Koh Samet Resort left us with no wifi internet for two of the three days that we were there. Usernames, passwords, and nothing else worked until the day before we were due to leave. We had to pay two baht per minute outside the resort for access.

Another problem is the continual slowness of some websites to load. I often just have to give up and do something else. Sometimes I have to go to wifi cafes or LAN internet cafes but the problem of slowness continues in those as well.

I have heard it said that the internet is Thailand is watched closely by government agencies, and they certainly do block websites that are deemed by them to be immoral. I know this because they put a Thai Police re-direct statement on the objectionable home pages. However, I have no evidence of any other interference.

My point is that internet in Thailand, by my experience, is unreliable, and often slow. On a recent trip to Vietnam I had no problems with internet at all in the three or so weeks that I was there. Makes one think, doesn’t it!