Fast Internet arrives in Lebanon…40 years from now
Some good news today: the minister of Telecom Marwan Hamadeh has announced that fast internet (DSL) will be launched by May 5. I remember hearing these promises ever I came
Luckily, all those involved realize that this is unacceptable. The reason provided by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, however, is very peculiar: to avoid a parallel black market. Huh? What about giving the people who pay your salary a decent Internet connection? Instead, they come up with defensive reasons like a black market. Sure, that might be a problem, but not for the customers: they don’t care how they get decent Internet access.
Table 1: Comparison Speed /Price
| Download Speed | | |
| 128 kb/s | 22 USD | Free, with fixed phone line |
| 256 kb/s | 35 USD | Not Available |
| 512 kb/s | 45 USD | Not Available |
| 1,024 kb/s | 80 USD | Not Available |
| 1,500 kb/s | Not Available | 13 USD |
| 3,000 kb/s | Not Available | 40 USD |
| 6,000 kb/s | Not Available | 52 USD |
| 8,000 kb/s | Not Available | 78 USD |
| 20,000 kb/s | Not Available | 78 USD |
All prices per month, Dutch prices from XS4ALL, which is part of market leader KPN.
*: Restricted up/download to roughly 1 GB a month, setup fee of 37 USD
** Unlimited up/download, free installation
For almost the same price of 80 USD, Internet access in
Another thing. The article states that Lebanon has upgraded its bandwidth to the rest of the Internet to 1 gigabit. That sounds like a lot, but it is actually an awfully small amount: only 8,000 customers who take the cheapest subscription can be served! If customers take the more expensive packages, this number drops even more.
6 comments:
I guess this blog is not the place to get to much technical, but last time I was in Lebanon I reached speeds of 8 Mb/s through a simple phone line. The trick is to only import the data that you are really watching and to have a provider outside of Lebanon. But watching Youtube is still out of the question. Besides, a 128 kb/s internet connection is available in Holland as a FREE addition to a fixed phone connection called "Slim bellen" (smart calling).
Thanks for the info, I have updated the table.
I've never heard of your solution, unless you talk about satellite downloading? If not, it must be expensive to call international while downloading, right?
No, it is not by satellite (but by a secure shell connection to a server abroad; not all providers offer this possibility). So there is only the local costs for internet access in Lebanon and the subscriptioncosts for an account abroad (may be low speed; in my case about 3$/month). It is purely text-based, so no pictures or movies. I came to this solution because the Lebanese provider blocked access to my Dutch webmail (I don't know why).
Not to dwell on the issue, but you cannot compare DSL in Lebanon to the Netherland or anywhere else in the developed world where DSL and cable are the norms and well entrenched. Not to mention that comparing a country in wars and turmoils since the mid 70s is not very realistic.
DSL speeds of 256, 512 and 1M are coming sooner than you think(2-3 weeks max) and once the technology matures, speeds can go up. After all, you dont jump in to an F1 car straight out of a street sedan... you cart first then F3 etc... same thing :p
Now, for Gerard who created some confusion... he is talking about something like ONSPEED which is not high speed, but a low res picture of the web page sent to your PC by a foreign ISP who has high speed connections. If you dont get it, it is like dial-up on steroids :)
Thanks for the calrification, Dan. ONSPEED is indeed similar to and I guess even better than my solution. Of course it is not what one really wants. But if for some reason you cannot get what you want, it is second best to optimize what you can get.
cLArification (My keyboard doesn't wnat to listen to me.)
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