One little problem

Every time we go to Asia we have some minor inconveniences with the Internet - everybody wants to be connected for different reasons. We mostly want to check directions and use tripadvisor for tips about restaurants and of course post some pics into social media.

In general based on my observations Asians sleep with their mobiles, everbody has at least one phone in their hands and probably one in the pocket. No, in the pocket there is a portable battery for 100500 millions mAh to never run out of power.

The assumption would be, based on the smartphonefication of the nation, that internet is easily accessible and good. Wrong! I can't say much about the mobile internet (3-4G), but WIFI. SUCKS. EVERYWHERE! any hotel or cafe will offer you free wifi ... if you manage to connect to it and assume the correct yoga pose to catch the signal!

The first hotel we stayed in had relatively good connection in the room, but nothing worked just 3 meters away on the porch. The second hotel had wifi hotspost everywhere and they all had the same name so our hardware couldn't decide to which on to connect and was jumping back and forth (we were on the top floor of the building).

We end up using some random free/open city network which is available almost everywhere on the island but also it means that somebody is definitely listening and storing all your data, besides the network wants us to 'register' with email/facebook/google/etc good thing that it doesn't verify the email so my name was james.bond@hermajesty.co.uk.

Possible solution

would be to use the 4G internet via phone. We actually have a local sim-card and an extra phone to stick it into. We got the simcard for free at the airport (True Move H is the operator), with 100 Baht one gets 1gb of traffic valid for 30 days. Pretty good deal pricewise for the need-to-use basis, but we would like to upload all our photos takend with multiple devices to the cloud and not care about gigabites. So we need Unlimited 4g traffic (or 3g should be ok). There are 3 main operators if I understand correctly and one of them provides quite good deals for mobile internet

One addition to the solution could be to get a mobile router which can then share the wifi signal with other devices. Pretty much any modern phone can do that, but we don't want to drain the battery of the phone very quickly and have it heating up in the pocket, do we?

btw check what i found here a Thai sim and a mobile router - all included for 5$/day - a bit pricy for a long stay but perfect for 10-15 days!