a look at anything technology related

Millions of visitors come to Thailand every year on vacation to enjoy the beautiful Thai beaches in the South, the exciting and exotic cities of Bangkok and Chiang Mai, or the gorgeous and unspoiled mountain villages to the North and East of the country. Many of these same visitors hove smart phones that they would like to have data services with. Thailand’s largest cellular carrier, AIS has a prepaid plan called 12Call. 12Call SIM cards are found in every convenience store including 7-11. A SIM card with 10 minutes free costs 99 baht. Also found at convenience stores are top-up cards to add additional minutes to your phone for either additional voice minutes. These same minutes can alternatively be used for data services.

Right out of the gate, data services can be used on smart phones such as the iPhone or Blackberry. Be very careful when using data this way as this will be very expensive! A much more cost effective method is to sign up for a 12Call data plan called MobileNET. The only problem is, there is very little documentation on how to do this in English. I will walk you through this process to get you the plan that you need.

Step 1: With your phone that has a 12Call SIM card installed, dial *138
Step 2: Press 1 for English
Step 3: Press 2 for GPRS MobileNET data packages
Step 4: Choose from the following options:

Press 1 – 30 day package that charges per minute
Press 2 – 30 day package that charges per Kilobyte
Press 3 – 30 day unlimited package
Press 4 – One day usage

Step 5: Based on your choice from step 4, Choose the plan that suits your data needs. My suggestion is to choose higher that what you think for the first month. You can then monitor your usage and adjust accordingly the next month.

Unless you have selected an unlimited data plan package, you will want to check how much data/hours that you have remaining. To do this, dial *138. AIS will return a text message showing you what your MobileNET balance is for the month. Please note that the same method of setup and verification of 12Call Data can be used for Blackberries, Android or any other smart phones that can use cellular data.

Below is a video I took of how to setup the 12Call MobileNET plan on an iPhone. Please keep in mind that the same method of Thailand’s 12Call setup and verification of data services can be used for Blackberries, Android or any other smart phone that can use cellular data services.