Compare Lebanon ISP's : Terranet, Cyberia, IDM, VISP...

[hadi_92]

Just a small question: is 128 k means 128 kilobytes per second? Or 128 kilobits per second? Does the down speed always stay 128k or it goes from like 60k to 100k?

[mix]

128 k means 128 kbits /second
so download speed has to be divided by 8
you also have to take out like 10 - 15 % afterwards for trafic stuff headers and bla bla bla
so 128/8=16 kbytes/s
so practically it should be aruond like 14-16.
now they supposedly install an antenna for like 3 users but for some reason i have only 1 so i think i might get an extra speed coz i usually download at 20 17-20k/s
but on average it does like 15.
i get 12 -14 on limewire

[Raficoo]

even with the illegal calble, there one way that at a time the speed would be great or not, caz i have a cable connection with 128kb, and at all time my download speed is like 14-18kb/s, caz the guy i get it from limits the bandwidth for all his custumers, that means the speed stays that all the time, that's if u want a constant illegal connection, if u want a fast connection at midnight or not in peak hours, get it from some1 that doesn't limit the bandwidth, so it means if ur the only guy at home thats using internet at say 4:00 AM, UR DOWNLOAD SPEED WILL GO FASTTTT,


i hope WHEN DSL WILL BE AVAillable in lebanon, THEY'll START ONE ISP, detticated to the DSL

[brams]

This thread is for sharing your good and bad experience with your Lebanon ISP... Tell us your stories!

Cool thread, hope the ISP are reading this.

- Who is you are ISP?

OK I'm English and I've been living in Beirut for 5 years non stop. I had Terranet dial up for two weeks in 2002 and very quickly moved onto Cyberia until 2004. I then went to Cable with Cyber Liban (Very good) then he went legal distributing GDS and I signed with IDM, before the July 2006 incident it was OK, now it's complete over priced crap.

It was much better then it was just Cyber Liban, no GDS, no IDM.

Terranet = total and utter shit.

Cyberia = not bad, comparable to 56k dial up in the late 90's in the UK.

IDM = 256k cable pretty good sometimes but slows down when leaving machine to download for long periods, 128k was OK, now shit.

- In what area do you live?

Achrafieh, Sassine, Beirut.

- Who much are you paying?

Then dial up 56k, IIRC it was 25 dollar a month?, now 50 bucks for 128k broadband which is shit.

- What kind of service are you getting (dial-up, wireless etc.) ?

Broadband 128k, GDS Wi-Fi WAN thing which is odd, but this is Lebanon right?. Cyberliban (very good). IDM crap.

- How is the customer support?

Good when you need them. Cyber Liban better though

- Are you happy with your connexion in general?

Nope, it's a pile of shit compared to just about any country in the world except maybe the Sudan and Mongolia, for 30 pounds a month in the UK my mother has 4mb download (400-500k/sec) 24/7 with not download limit. Kuwait has got good internet, Qatar has and so has Dubai.

- Would you recommand it to other customers?

Sure if they desperately need a 2nd rate overpriced service why not?

[zeez]

Nice feedback! It's an excellent summary of "internet in Lebanon"...

I am on a sort of illegal cable for less than 50$, I get a 128k (symetrical!), and it works very well for what it is... I can't tell more about it because it is "illegal" houha... & with that, I am suppose to consider myself as a privileged lebanese...

All countries are well connected today... I have heard Syria offers cheap and very fast DSL connections (is this true?).

About Lebanon, from what I have heard (but is that true? if you know something please confirm or infirm) the problem is very simple: a guy called Ralph Lahoud - who happens to be the son of the president of the republic of Lebanon - holds the UNIQUE licence for high speed internet. So he sets the rules and all ISP must pay him (= his company set-up)...

Maybe someone should interview him so he could explain to the people what is going on exactly and what they are suppose to expect.

(+ they are limiting the bandwidth to avoid people using Skype & stop paying phone bills to the state telecom)

[brams]

Nice feedback! It's an excellent summary of "internet in Lebanon"...

I am on a sort of illegal cable for less than 50$, I get a 128k (symetrical!), and it works very well for what it is... I can't tell more about it because it is "illegal" houha... & with that, I am suppose to consider myself as a privileged lebanese...

All countries are well connected today... I have heard Syria offers cheap and very fast DSL connections (is this true?).

About Lebanon, from what I have heard (but is that true? if you know something please confirm or infirm) the problem is very simple: a guy called Ralph Lahoud - who happens to be the son of the president of the republic of Lebanon - holds the UNIQUE licence for high speed internet. So he sets the rules and all ISP must pay him (= his company set-up)...

Maybe someone should interview him so he could explain to the people what is going on exactly and what they are suppose to expect.

(+ they are limiting the bandwidth to avoid people using Skype & stop paying phone bills to the state telecom)

OK without wanting to upset too many people, here goes.

Frankly the standard of IT competency in Lebanon is a joke, OK I admit computers is my hobby and I am pretty good with them, but to be involved in any way shape or form with computers in Lebanon is like going back a few decades in Europe, so the fact the ISP's here are utter shit and answer to a crook is no surprise. I recall I wanted to built a PC a couple years ago, the choice of components was so poor an over priced I had to fly to the UK for a week on a business trip and brought the parts back in my suitcase. I bought a Apple MacBook Pro 6 months ago in the UK for 1400 pounds, this is when The Mac Store next the Virgin downtown was charging 3600 US for them.

Lebanon to me is, I'm sorry to say and I do realise that there are obviously sad reasons for it, but facts are facts and compared with most other countries in the world Lebanon is stuck in the Stone Age in terms of computers and IT.

As you guessed from my comments above, I had better dial up in the UK in 1998 then I did in Lebanon in 2003. Dial up in the UK is and has been for sometime free of charge, thus people on low incomes can at least get on the net and educate themselves and keep in touch with familiy and friends. Where I work, most people do not have a PC, they can't afford them, one of my managers can just about put an email together. Compared to nearly anybody I work with, my dear old mother, bless her soul absolutely blows them away and my mum is 68 years old, most of the people I work with are in the late 20's or early 30's, and I think it's shameful that a women this age can blow them into the dust using a computer.

I've only been to Syria once and wasn't inclined to want to go again, nothing about the place jumped out at me and said, wow this is cool. I like Lebanon IT aside, people are nice and funny, life is pleasant if you can afford it. Girls are pretty. But is Syria has got DSL then Lebanon should be ashamed that they let somthing like Syria beat them.

Trouble is with Lebanon is there are too many fu**ing crooks running the show, putting their own personal greed and interest in front of that of the nation's and her people. Whilst everybody else is busy chatting using webcams and Skype we're stuck with crap. I once asked a guy at Virgin, why the fu*k do you bother selling webcams in Lebanon

[solipsist]

We live in Faytroun (yeah I know that's nowhere near civilization!) and have "broadband" from the local Cable Guy. Apparently he gets his bandwidth from TerraNet, a company I'd rather not associate with if I could because spammers deserve to burn in hell, and I'm an atheist just for the record.

An interesting detail when tracerouting my email server (fastmail.fm/mail.messagingengine.com) is that its routed over SatGate for four hops. Apparently, there's no cable network between Mt Lebanon and Beyrouth so they relay over sat! Imagine the latencies we get here!

Sat relaying is expensive, which explains the 44 bucks or something we pay for probably illegally resold bandwidth, and that satjump is the bottleneck. It adds a lot of delays and limits bandwidth to something in the range of 80 kbps if we're lucky, and that's downstream! Upstream we have like 10 kbps! The latency and the extremely high packetloss also makes downloads impossible unless they can be resumed.

Is there any way I can get a real connection, a contract with a real ISP here in Faytroun? Anything is better than this! I can't access my email because the servers are in the US, I see 25% packetloss when pinging them!

Being Swedish I'm kinda spoiled, paying $30 for a 10mbit symmetrical LAN broadband link in my home country... I knew I couldn't get that here and I was prepared for it to be slow, even dialup speeds are okay for me to do my job, but I didn't expect the network infrastructure to be totally underscaled with 35% packetloss as a rule...