Internet in Thailand: How It Compares with Poland and What Travelers Should Know

Few countries in the world can compete with Poland when it comes to internet access, especially mobile internet. And although Poland is definitely not among the leaders in average connection speeds (it currently ranks 30th in the world for fixed internet and 54th for mobile), the ratio of price to speed and available data allowance is simply EXCELLENT. If someone in Poland wants extremely high speeds, they can usually get them too. They'll just pay more, though still not much.

When I moved to Thailand, even fixed internet was nothing to celebrate... The problem back then was speed: most of my friends in Poland already had 100 Mbps fiber in 2013 for around PLN 50 a month. Meanwhile, I was happy that I'd managed to get a temperamental 13/1 Mbps ADSL connection in Bangkok for 50% more. That was a real achievement, because for my first few months I had to live in Thailand with an upload speed of 0.25 Mbps! On top of that, every day I had to enter my username and password in a browser. Once I switched to ADSL, I of course immediately replaced the modem with my own, because the ones supplied by Thai providers are just as bad as the Polish ones.

A great deal has changed since then. Thailand kept expanding its infrastructure aggressively until it finally moved to fiber, and it no longer lags so far behind Poland. The average download speed is finally almost the same, though probably not at such good prices. I'll return to fixed internet later, though. Mobile internet is more interesting, and it will probably matter far more to people heading to Thailand on vacation.

Mobile internet in Thailand

You could safely say that, for a long time, Thai internet was the exact opposite of Japanese internet. The Japanese adopted 3G very quickly, and as a result public Wi-Fi was completely unheard of. That's only started changing recently because of tourists. Thailand, meanwhile, relied mainly on Wi-Fi for years.

In most places around the world, mobile internet is still expensive, or at least was very expensive until recently. That was true in Thailand too, and because incomes here aren't high, few people would pay what they do in the US, the equivalent of more than PLN 200 a month, just to get a halfway decent data package on their phone. So local mobile operators found a way around the problem of heavy data use years ago.

Wi-Fi everywhere
Every mobile operator has thousands of secured hotspots scattered across the country, though of course they're most concentrated in the capital. You'll find them in every 7/11, in shopping malls, and anywhere else lots of people pass through.

As a customer of a given network, you get access to its hotspots, often with no data limits and no throttling after you cross a set number of gigabytes. All you need is a username and password. Your phone number is the username, and you generate the password by sending a text message (so everyone has their own login details). When you buy a SIM card at the airport, the staff will often sort everything out for you on the spot. A few years ago I logged into one of these Wi-Fi networks, and ever since, my phone and iPad have connected to it and every other hotspot from True, my provider, automatically. More precisely, it's TrueMove H, which belongs to True, but there's no point complicating the terminology, so I'll generalize here :). Because there are so many hotspots, I have coverage in most of the places where I spend time. Although it may be the other way around: I choose places where I know the internet is excellent :). Completely unlimited Wi-Fi isn't included with every package, but it's fairly common. If someone buys a plan with limited Wi-Fi, they can add an unlimited package at any time. I once had a subscription where Wi-Fi was sold separately, but another 100 THB (about PLN 10) removed the limits.

Since then, I've been finding very fast hotspots in more and more places, and they no longer surprise me, but those speeds are definitely not the norm. Usually, it's only a few or a dozen or so Mb/s. Of course, it would be better to have 50 GB of unlimited LTE instead of Wi-Fi, plus completely unlimited music and video streaming services with no artificial speed restrictions. But since Thailand has nothing like that (especially nothing cheap), Thai people manage by using Wi-Fi.

Data allowances have grown a lot in recent years, though they're still nothing impressive. Five years ago, I had barely a few hundred megabytes a month. Now I have 15 GB, which I'd use up in Poland without the slightest trouble, but here it's more than enough because of those hotspots. It's different when you fly to the islands: Wi-Fi isn't easy to find on the beach. I haven't mentioned any specific prices because it's a bit more complicated. When you live here, you often buy packages that include more than just phone service.

All in one

The network I'm with provides fixed internet and cable TV in addition to mobile service, so instead of buying everything separately, Thai people get an all-in-one package. This also means prepaid service isn't direct competition for a contract. Even for me, the package with everything works out cheaper, despite the fact that I've used the cable TV exactly zero times to this day. True also has... cafes. They're often connected to company stores or customer service locations, so if there's a line, you can have a Thai tea or sit with your laptop and some cake while you wait. Of course, there are also plenty of cafes outside their retail locations. There's even one in the building where I live:

Just as in Poland you can get discounts at different stores, cafes, and so on by having, say, a credit card from a certain bank, mobile operators in Thailand are also very active in this area, not just banks.

Great internet during a vacation in Thailand

There's one option worth considering if you're coming to Thailand on vacation and want to spend little on internet access while using as much as you like, including outside the hotspots. I'm not sure whether every network offers packages like this because I only follow the provider I use. In any case, with True, instead of buying a SIM card with a standard data package (meaning Unlimited, which, just as in Poland, will be throttled after you download a certain number of gigabytes), you can choose an option where you don't select how many gigabytes you get before throttling. You choose the internet speed instead.

In other words, there are packages, and these are the ones I recommend to tourists, where instead of a speed limit of around 300 Mbps, you get much lower speeds and the internet runs at, for example, a maximum of only 6 Mb/s from the start. In return, no further throttle kicks in during your vacation to slow it down even more. At a few megabits per second, you can do almost anything on a phone comfortably: browse FB, send an email, watch a video on YT, make an Insta Story, use navigation, and so on. And with no data limits, it won't be a problem if several hefty gigabytes of freshly shot photos and video spend the night uploading to the cloud from a hotel with weak Wi-Fi.

Of course, if you choose a standard offer (for example, 15 GB Unlimited), the throttle won't take you down to a few megabits per second. The internet will slow so dramatically that you won't even be able to use Facebook, leaving you to buy another gigabyte package. That's why slower internet that is genuinely unlimited seems better to me. There are, admittedly, those ubiquitous Wi-Fi networks I mentioned, but if you plan to explore, you'll often be out of their range and will have to use your 3G/LTE package.

Okay, so how much do you need to spend on a decent internet plan? Providers here rely on constantly changing promotions, so any specifics I gave now would be outdated in no time. Still, you can assume PLN 100 a month is enough for a solid plan covering the full month, and even at half that price there will be options to choose from.

There are several mobile operators, mainly True (TrueMoveH), DTAC, and AIS. Whichever one you choose should be OK, unless you happen to hit a coverage dead zone. I've been with True from the beginning because they used to hand out free starter SIMs as people got off the plane, and later I had fixed internet from them anyway, so I stuck with them. I have a few friends on other networks and the rest use True, but everyone seems about equally satisfied. If you're traveling with someone, it's definitely better for the other person to choose a different network. Then, if you end up somewhere remote with no coverage, the other person can create a hotspot.

Thai censorship

Thailand doesn't have a fully unrestricted internet. For example, if a foreign website said something bad about the king, it would be banned immediately (and if it were a local site, it would most likely cease to exist, because its administrators would have a hard time running it from prison). In 2015, the government wanted internet traffic in Thailand to pass through a single gateway, which would make online surveillance easier. After protests and a massive DDoS attack on government websites, the idea was dropped.

The evolution of fixed internet in Thailand

I said I'd come back to home internet for a moment. So, in 2014, a 30 Mbps connection was one of the fastest available in Thai apartments, and only some buildings had the necessary infrastructure. Today, the same operator offers 1000 MBs, which costs 1600 THB together with mobile internet and a basic cable TV package, or just under PLN 200 (unless you want 500 Mbps upload instead of 100, which costs more). That speed is available only in the capital and a few other large cities, though. Elsewhere, the maximum is 300 Mbps for now. If someone wants a cheap connection, they pay around 600 THB for 30/10 Mbps, and that includes mobile internet too: truly unlimited, but capped at 1 Mbps, which is very slow. For another 200 THB, you get a tolerable 4 Mbps with no throttling at all and 50/20 Mbps fiber at home, equal to the average speed in Thailand. In a few months this offer will probably be completely different because they change them constantly here.

At first I was completely unhappy with Thai internet, and later only so-so, because it was nowhere near what Poland had. Now it's good, so I guess I can finally stop complaining :). There's a chance my webinars will now improve in quality and YouTube will stop showing me the message that my upload is too slow during live streams. Unfortunately, as long as I had 20 Mbps upload, that happened even with streams at a 3000 kb/s bitrate. Now my upload runs at just under 60 Mbps instead of 25 Mbps, so it has to be better. I can't connect a 1000/100 line because the infrastructure in the building has to be prepared first. Besides, I probably won't need it. What I have now should be enough for a long time. They could increase the upload, though; then I'll be able to broadcast in 4K :).

The internet speed statistics come from Ookla, the company that owns speedtest.net.