Has anyone tried the 512k wireless broadband plan from any of the ISPs?
I noticed that cyberia and tdm have a requirement for eligibility. You need to have 3 other people in your building with broadband before you're eligible.
However, terranet didnt mention anything about that in their EULA.
How efficient is the 512k connection? Does the speed vary? Anyone know wether its a 802.11x standard that they are operating on?
If you've used this service I'd really like to hear from you. Thanks.
Yeah i have the terranet 512.
OK here we go:
-Terranet (unlike other ISPs) use a satellite connection as backbone. A low latency satellite (ping 600ms) but still. I should have gone with idm, theire the n.1 ISP in lebanon and dont use satellite.
-Web browsing is great for lebanese sites only. For lebanese sites, latency is comparable to that of US ADSL. For outside sites, it's nowhere near ADSL, yet faster than modem and most illegal cables. as a test, I'm going to open this page now:
www.discovery.com (haven't opened it recently, so it's not cached)
Took 25 seconds to display (35 seconds if you wait for the flash to load completely).
Google/yahoo/altavista is almost instant...
www.microsoft.com took 7 seconds ...
As I said, crappy latency.
-In the morning, early afternoon and late night, you get 45-55KB. In the peak hours (afternoon and night, especially weekends), you'll get less (right now, at midnight, I'm getting 35KB). It also takes more time to get to the 35KB speed at peak hour (3 seconds to connect, then 10 seconds to reach top speed right now). On very rare occasions, the connection gets slower (15KB) and pages are slower to load. But that's rare.
-They did something to kazaa, I never saw downloads at more than 8K, yet when tunneled kazaa onnection through HTTP using http-tunnel, I saw 50K downloads, which makes me think that they put some kind of limitation on kazaa.
-about 23 sessions only means it is not recommended to share the connection on several PCs and try not to open too much software at the same time. Open Kazaa+Emule+Bittorrent+MSN = kherbet el denye
-You get a logged off if you turn off your PC and will have to log on through a webpage to use your connetion. I have developped a PHP script to automate that login, if you are interested.
-upload is THE SAME SPEED AS MODEMS. Ya3ne big attachements will still be a pain. Actually the upload on 128Kbits is 16kbits, that slower than modem. On the 512 and the 256 it's 32kbits, roughly the same speed. havent tested it, though.
-they have blocked the sites of fiberlinksnetworks and cedarcom.net. In the case you didn't know, the 2 above companies are planning to release a broadband offer that will compete with the GDS/terranet/idm/cyberia in the future (inshallah - I dont know when!). Blocking their sites is... ya3ne tfi 3ala heik 7araket.
-did not try Voice chat yet
-There does not seem to be a download quota (or "fair access policy) until now
-You get a private (not public!) IP. Not good.
-They have blocked VPN connections. I was counting on VPN connections to bypass their session limitation...
That's as far as I know. God knows what else they have blocked or slowed down.
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Now for the good aspects:
-no connection shortages, ya3ne internet 24/24 no matter what happends.
-Nice to see flash movie loading very fast!
-I love listening to 128k internet radio stations while still beind able to browse and download at a good speed.
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Conclusion:
If you think that you will get a connection comparable to the ADSL they have outside, you'll be deceived.
This is obviously more relieable than most illegal connections, but they have the same private IP/kazaa slowing down/crappy upload problems/session limitation problem.
