Thai police have found a 350-meter (1,100-foot) fiberoptic cable running from two village homes in Kanchanaburi province across the border into Myanmar, where it kept a suspected scam compound online.
The South China Morning Post reported that officers were called to homes in Nong Lu, a village in the border province. At one property they found a 48-core cable with a heavy protective covering, strung along pylons. Trairat Viriyasirikul, acting secretary general of Thailand's National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, said the line carried about six terabytes of data a day, enough to serve 300 to 400 people. Instead, it fed a compound that reportedly included an illegal border casino and a suspected scam center. One male suspect was reportedly paid 700 baht (about $20) a day to let the cable run through his house. The newspaper's account implies a scam gang paid him, though it does not say so outright.
Six terabytes a day works out to a sustained rate of roughly 550 megabits per second, by our arithmetic. That is a serious pipe for two ramshackle houses, and it is not something a village would normally have.
The case fits the newspaper's broader picture of the region. It describes Myanmar as the new epicenter of the global scam trade, a title Cambodia held until recent years. Mainly Chinese scam bosses are said to be moving out of large factory-style compounds and into small hotels, condos, and villas. The Three Pagodas Pass area is reportedly shielded by ethnic armed militias, and NGOs cited by the paper say hundreds, possibly thousands, of workers there were trafficked and forced into the work.
Smaller sites are harder to spot, but they still need a connection. A cable that size leaves a footprint: bandwidth drawn on one side of a border and consumed on the other. Whether that makes connectivity a useful place for enforcement to look is an open question, since the source describes one cable and one suspect, and says nothing about how many others may exist.