@ kareem_nasser: what I deserve is a 4Mb/s connection with a 15-20 GB download quota. That would be more than enough for me. I am saying what I deserve is because I refuse to get a crappy internet connection just because other Lebanese are abusing it. The slow internet connection and the high costs are hindering my informal education of web development and programming.

I do agree that very fast internet is only required by media, banks and other firms but that doesn't mean we should be given slow internet with very little quota as regular users. I'm paying 50$ for 512K with 4GB quota limit while in Australia for example you can get 4Mb with 30GB quota limit for the same price. Enough said :)
speaking of quotas, it's not that cheap in Canada (100$ was in CAD), phones are not cheap (you have to pay 75CAD to get a reasonable quota) but again the salaries are higher so it's relative.
as for regular usage, youtube surfing and other clings and clangs, a 512 connection is more than enough (if it's not shared and the server is full) for streaming and such. but of course it's not the standard, IMHO 4mb is the worldwide standard. not too much, not too little, such as the 24inch monitor is the international standard size. ie: in 10 years you'll still have 24 inch cause it's optimal, too big will be too big for general purpuses, and too small will limit usability (talking about 10 years from now in monitor year and 10 years are too much in internet time) but 4mb/7mb should be the standard for the near future (they already are in Canada), knowing that HTML 5 is on it's way, the web will be even faster and you wont be needing the juice of a higher quota. flash movies are gona die and HTML movies are gona replace it (youtube will convert all its database to HTML movies by 2012. so all what i'm saying is that things are gona get better, just hold on and enjoy what you have now.

@kareem_nasser yes I'm a developer who recently left Ubisoft Montreal and settled in Lebanon as a Web developer, if you're interested reading forums visit www.gamedev.net and www.gamasutra.com. following me on twitter currently will flood you with Web development topics if that excites you let me know

Cheers
_joe_ wroteyes I'm a developer who recently left Ubisoft Montreal and settled in Lebanon as a Web developer.
Cheers
Dear Joe,

I simply salute you for what you have done ! I am living in Canada now too and planning to go back home once I am done my education.

Enjoy your stay here.
@joe: Why left Ubisoft? Game Dev -> Web.. I think I want it the other way around
@Joe, hello, welcome back to Lebanon and it is really a pleasure to have you here with us, just out of curiosity, my question is same as Arithma, why did you choose to leave game development and a company such aw Ubisoft and come back to Lebanon? Anyways, I would like to wish you the best of luck in the path you have chosen, have a good day and see you around :)
Sure guys, guess Kareem proposed a thread concerning Web development and my experience in Canada, guess i'll wrap it all up there, stay posted
xterm wroteYou deserve more than 4mbps

Edit: I bet rahmu uses this: http://shop.orange.co.uk/broadband/ultra
Not exactly, I am with the rival ISP (called Free), but close :-)

With all due respect to everyone on this thread, there are some monstrosities that have been said. You cannot put quotas to internet connection to stop piracy. That would be like putting quotas on food to stop obesity. The right to connect to the internet and interact on the world wide web should be a given and in no way should be limited.

Here in France I get unlimited access to the internet at 30mbps. In my old apartment I had a 100mbps connection for 20 euros per month (roughly 35$). And given the cost of life, 20 euros is what I pay when I go to a restaurant in one sitting, so that would be the value of 10-15$ in Lebanon.

The only fair reason to limit a connection in my opinion is the availability of bandwith. I do not know how they manage to do it in France, but since it is available, no one has the right to limit it. Especially not the media lobby-ism trying to prevent "piracy".

As for the people who consider a high speed connection only useful for illegal downloads and games: More and more applications will try to send heavy graphics over an HTTP connection. Google Earth has a 3D rendition of New York. Or I could also mention Street View fro, Google maps. Sure a 1mbps connection would allow you to see them. But a high speed connection would allow you to interact with that virtual reality in real-time (no-to-little lag). Not only games, think about all the possibilities of such a virtual place, in terms of accessibility (for the handicapped people) or educational.

And what about remote working? Are banks and big corporations the only ones who need to connect different sites? What about freelancers who want to collaborate with dev teams in India to render a product to a client in Brazil? Should Lebanon not be a part of that? Because it is happening, whether we want it or not. We either log in or get left behind.

Web browsing in Lebanon consists mainly of Facebook and some social networking, but that's mainly because the limited connectivity allows us to do just so. Can you only imagine with a country with such a high diaspora, the effect of mass access to VoIP with video calls?

Again, no one should limit internet access. And stop saying what we have is enough.

**EDIT: typo; privacy != piracy. thank you _joe_
@rahmu 100% when i said: enjoy what you have now. i didnt mean that it's enough, things will come gradually, france is number 1 in connections, Canada only got the high speed internet in 2006, people (like my dad's cousin who is 45 year old) is still using a 1mb connection in Montreal.
Still with a 20mb connection, i used to have a lot of trouble monitoring my computer via the computer at work, the connection (50mb at work and 20mb home) wasn't fast enough for remote monitoring(believe it or not). Lebanon also lacks advanced online banking, online conferences and other new gen online activities.

And Canada has a limited quota EVERYWHERE, and their argument is : protection of copyrights and PIRACY (and not privacy as rahmu said) issues, before i got my internet contract i called the biggest 2 networks in Canada: Bell and Videotron and both said the same thing. so maybe it's a disguise, maybe it's a lie, but that's what they are saying. you don't have an unlimited connection in all Canada.

hope that makes things clear, after all canada is not france, i believe france is the leading country in internet (not sure about japan and the surroundings) but at least in europe and the US
rahmu spends his quota downloading crapy open source applications!
xterm wroterahmu spends his quota downloading crapy open source applications!
LMAO! why do you hate Linux this much?! :P
I agree with Joe. I live in Canada, my connection is 14mpbs and my download quota is 60GB per month with $1.35 per additional GB. (I pay $50 a month)

As he said, Canada has caps everywhere. In the US however, there are connections with 250 GB quota / month !
Kassem wroteLMAO! why do you hate Linux this much?! :P
How on earth can i hate linux with a nickname like xterm?

I just love messing with rahmu.
I don't care about quota, give me speed.
xterm wroterahmu spends his quota downloading crapy open source applications!
I will not get sucked into this ... I ... will ... not... ARRRGH
I heard about it on the news. I just need speed. A little bit more quota, and I'm set.
@joe if you want to come to Lebanon, good luck with the slow internet, power cuts, salaries and traffic jams. Ahla w sahla.
Before leaving please refer me to someone who needs a developer (web, mainly) like me in Montreal or Canada, and put a word for me. I'd be very thankful.
all I want is a 512 kb/s connection with a limit of 8 gb and a good latency for 25$ a month...
_joe_ wroteSometimes when i read forums like that i wonder why people don't try to research a bit more and be realistic, quoting some of the posts here, users are waiting for some non logical quotas, me as a person who resided in Montreal for 3 years, and being a heavy user on the internet, got the biggest quota in the region which is a connection of 20mbps with a limit of 100gb (a 30gb can be added for an extra 30$) that connection cost 130$, and believe me, those 130$ can fly within a month, because everything is "relative" a 7mb connection has a 40gb limit a 2mb connection 10gb limit (similar to Lebanon +2gb) and so on and so forth. So trust me a connection of 4mb with a 20gb limit is not logical, not legal, because worldwide standards limit the connections for piracy reduction and similar directions. Now you tell me: we are in Lebanon we do whatever we want, that's your choice but that will just push us further in that retarded hole and we will stick to our fancy 1mb connection. know that a regular user doesn't have use of more than 1mb which is more than sufficient for media streaming, browsing, and flash/small games and a 5mb connection is more than enough for a single user heavy gamer, a faster connection will only be explained with several users on the same connection (i was living with roommates). And for a conclusion, no quota offered a free night traffic period. So to wrap it all up, i came back to Lebanon in January, and i can say, as much as the switch from a 20mbps to 512(wise bronze) was weird, i don't find it limitating me except for gaming. if so get a real ip for +20$ on your dsl quota and you're up to 80-120ms ping, not so good for shooters but a smooth and nice connection never the less.
I hope that my post made things clear, all the best for all
Regards

Joe Hannouch
Game Developer
Ubisoft Entertainment-Montreal
Canada's GDP per capita is about $40,000 and the lebanese is less than $10,000....... see how relative it is!!!1 :(
i was really disturbed by the mention that the internet in Lebanon is sufficient ! you can never ever say such a thing about technology , internet in particular .

the quota is pretty reasonable now , and i will tell you why , if it was now made an "unlimited up/down" can you estimate the number of customers upgrading to higher speeds ? new consumers , not to mention companies expanding and including internet related XYZ.. our national bandwidth is limited by the way its delivered here . in the case of a sudden burst of costumers the whole network will crash . they off course indirectly don't allow that using different methods one stated above . The IMEWE cable scheduled to reach soon Tripoli promises to finally unlock the world of enormous internet speeds and huge caps for all . as i stated tens of times before our shitty twisted-pair cable network bottlenecks the speed-latency . Fortunately the ministry of communications completing the works of Bassile is laying fiber between all telephony switching centers "centrals" which quite frankly is a step i never saw coming . It is expected that the fiber network will be complete before the IMEWE lands . The IMEWE will land in Tripoli so naturally the fastest most stable connection should be near the landing site ! Beirut the most city in Lebanon that consumes internet should be connected to Tripoli with a high capacity fiber cable . I hope the quality of the works will be premium , something we are never used to in Lebanon .