Recent market data shows that consumer demand for smartphone technology in Thailand has risen dramatically the past year. The driving force behind the sudden demand seems to be an interest in social media sites.

One obstacle to the country's modernization of mobile technology is the process the government uses to allocate bandwidth to telecom providers. The surge consumer demand and the slowness of the country to develop a mobile infrastructure have created an ‘irresistible force meets immovable object’ conflict with an unknown outcome. 

Smartphones made up more than two out of every five mobile phone sales (about 42 percent) in Thailand in the past 12 months, according to research from GfK. Less than two years ago, the demand for smartphones was half that amount.

This trend should be welcome news for telecom and device providers. Currently, 25 million of the country's 66 million people use the Internet, leaving a lot of room for growth. There are 1.2 mobile phones per person, a sign that the public embraces technology, even though feature phones still make up the majority of mobile phones in Thailand.

Social media is very popular, with 18 million users, about 72 percent of the country's total number of Internet users, having a social media account. Most of the recent activity is in Instagram. Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) also account for much of the social media usage.

Thais spend more time on the Internet using mobile devices than they do watching television. Almost half of all media use (49 percent) came from mobile devices while television made up 36 percent.

One of the biggest obstacles to Thailand having widespread cutting edge mobile technology is the process the government used to allocate mobile spectrum to providers.

Communications in Thailand is regulated by a government agency, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission. It held an auction in October 2012 to allocate 3G spectrum to telecom service providers.

Foreign companies were barred from participating in the auction and the 'winners' paid bargain prices for their share of the 3G pie. This left many observers feeling that the process was corrupt. It has also casts doubts on Thailand's ability to adopt 4G technology.

The 3G auction, although problematic, was an improvement over previous mobile spectrum allocations and private operators are testing 4G networks on a small scale. This leaves room for optimism that Thailand will be able to implement a 4G network soon.

However, if business as usual continues to be the process for developing mobile technology in Thailand, the country will be full of irate users and lag behind its neighbors in technology and competitiveness.