battikh wroteTeo, have some questions about the doc, i know it is still at an early stage and that my understanding of the type of data that flows between users in lebanon is something close to 0, so i need some clarifications...
the document says it is a solution to the internet problem in lebanon and that it is and cheaper and faster way to achieve that compared to having more bandwidth with the international backbone. but would having this fiber project done achieve that? how much bandwidth can it save? how much bandwidth today is used for traffic between to lebanese users? if i take my internet habits as a reference it wouldn't be more than 1% (which is actually much less) of my total bandwidth. so how much would it save us? 1% of out total international bandwidth? and how much is 1% in our case? how much money it represents in a year?
such a project is definitely very important and it is what should have been done since the beginning and it can have many advantages. but i'm not sure that 1 of the advantages is to save a lot of bandwidth. again, i have no idea how much traffic goes from 1 ISP to the other in lebanon so i could be dramatically wrong, which is why i'm asking the question as you and nuclearcat probably have an answer to that.
but yes, it does have some important advantages like stated in the document, mainly for corporate use. companies would be able to interconnect their offices with it instead of using microwave. renting it would bring money and would give a better quality of service to companies, but wouldn't save much from our international bandwidth. like for example, the future movement is currently interconnecting all their offices in lebanon and havin, g IP telephony between them (which is not very legal in lebanon)so if we had a nice fiber mpls cloud, they would have definitely found some advantage in using it.
and as mir said and you confirmed, having other services to make it more attractive would be great. but for example, to have file sharing... file sharing is mainly used for illegal things. the file sharing things that really use bandwidth are mainly MP3s and porn, both illegal due to copyrights thing. so can the government go for such a thing? they would receive lots of pressure from other countries to stop or at least monitor the service.
anyways, to make it short, here's my question: yes, it is important to apply this in lebanon as it is how it should have been since the beginning but how much bandwidth would it really save us? is it really a solution on the long term? would it let the end users get better bandwidth thx to it? when more people will get internet access, wouldn't we have to go again for extra international bandwidth? so is it really a solution to THIS problem or "just" a way to make things better from a networking point of view and have a better quality of service for the internal traffic?
1. As I stated in the document - it is more a quick workaround until/IF the "submarine" cable arrives.
2. Even if the submarine cable finally arrives at Tripoli. And then what??? How would you distribute these 10/20/50Gbps among the users?
You would need a serious infrastructure for this. How will you bring 1Gbps of this amount to Saida??? By pidgeons, camels, goats?
Aah, since we started speaking of goats, maybe Mr. Bassil would give away some of the goats from his personal goat-harem?
3. Believe me, a lot of the countries have such peerings. We had the same in Bulgaria since 1999 and it saved us (and keeps saving us) A LOT
of bandwidth, 60% and more of the bandwidth is kept local. And I bet $5000 that the same will happen in Lebanon. And when you have
two options for a download - one international with speed of 12Kbps and one local with a speed or 150Kbps, you would definitely prefer
the local one and slowly,slowly people will get used to go for "the local one".
This is as we stated above - torrents, webcam sessions, file transfer (http/ftp), office VPNs, remote desktop sessions, browsing, gaming.
File sharing can be used for legal content as well - Linux ISOs, portage mirroring. If someone is transmitting illegal or hostile content -
let the authorities hunt after him. Many other governments went for "such things" - there is nothing wrong. But as for the SPECIAL Lebanese
government, which is SOOO LEGAL and likes everything to be really, really, RRRRRREEEEALLLY LEGAL - YES, it might become a big problem.
Btw, since you use the word *government* for the Lebanese one, pls in future when reffering to it put the word "government" in quotes.
Why? Because the Lebanese "government" doesn't comply with the main reason and goal of a regular goverment.
