The development of the Thai telecommunications industry has been constrained by competing interests and creeping pace of deregulation. Successive Thai governments have been criticised for a stop-start approach to sector reform. Although there has been rapid growth in mobile phone sector, the country’s telecommunications infrastructure is otherwise unimpressive. A major constraint has been decades of underinvestment by the state-owned Telephone Organization of Thailand (TOT). Fixed line penetration is extremely low at just 10.4% of the population. Another constraint is that the telecommunications infrastructure over most of the country is essentially based on copper wire. As a result, only 4% of the Thai population have broadband access. Even dial-up Internet access is significantly below world standards, at only 10.2% of the population. The immediate prospects for a significant growth in online learning outside urban areas would therefore appear to be poor.