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Waiting for Godot

By on December 16, 2011 in Lebanon

The government always succeeds to leave us on our tiptoes waiting for the “next big thing” to solve the problems with our cellular networks.

It started with the poor service following the expansion two years ago, then the absence of 3G, and now the whole mess they got themselves into after introducing 3G! Thus the need for $110 million now to enhance the two networks and eventually put an end to the problems in 8 months.

“I am happy to announce to the Lebanese that the National Quality of Services for the cellular networks will put an end to the poor mobile services. This plan will take eight months to be completed. But the Lebanese will feel the positive results in two to three months. Today I have signed the appropriate investment decision which will allow the two cellular companies, Mtc Touch and Alfa, to start work on this big project,” the minister said. Source

I wonder what are we going to anticipate next!

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Cedarcom wants to suspend 3G in Lebanon

By on September 28, 2011 in Lebanon

Do you remember back in March how the guys at Cedarcom pretended to be fighting for a faster internet in Lebanon and gathered more than 40,000 fans around them?

The same guys are now working hard to take us back to state zero by suing the Ministry of Telecommunications for launching 3G! And it might be just a coincidence that the new service can go much faster than their Mobi, which they themselves have admitted it cannot go beyond 1Mbps, at a cheaper price. You can read more about the issue in The Daily Star and Al-Mustaqbal.

Now can someone tell me what were the real goals of their campaign for a faster internet?

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Here’s to launching the 3G service in Lebanon!

By on September 20, 2011 in Lebanon

Last day I got a phone call from a gentleman in MTC Touch telling me that I will be granted the 3G service for a 1 month free trial period, and so right now I’m among the lucky people who got to participate in the pilot testing of this service in Lebanon. An yes I’m so excited about it!!

The service got activated at around 1PM today on my phone and didn’t require any special configuration to run. I randomly started loading websites and found the connection to be pretty fast compared to home ADSL and the crappy GPRS. Below are two tests done using speedtest.net after I shared the connection with my laptop.

As you can see, download is @ 1.7Mbps which is superb compared to the current internet speeds, while upload is varying between 0.11 and 0.22Mbps. Ping is of course higher that it is supposed to be, and I hope it’ll improve soon. Note that I was in Beirut central district at the time of this test, and I guess speed might vary depending on your location.

3G subscriptions will be available for both postpaid and prepaid lines, and data transfer will be limited to 4GB/month. It isn’t clear tough how much will the operators charge for it.

I’ll hopefully be posting more updates on the connection quality and speed throughout this trial period.

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MTC Touch slashes calling rates for prepaid lines

By on June 14, 2011 in Lebanon

It turned out that the price reductions I posted about yesterday are really coming and will be targeting owners of prepaid phone lines. According to this article from The Daily Star, MTC Touch is releasing 3 new recharge cards tomorrow for its Magic prepaid lines:

  1. Start: Priced at $10 and has 30 talking minutes (Rate is $0.33/min)
  2. Smart: Priced at $16.6 and has 60 talking minutes  (Rate is $0.27/min)
  3. Super: Priced at $30 and has 120 talking minutes (Rate is $0.25/min)

Given that there will be no hidden charges, MTC Touch is offering up to 36% reduction over the current rates ($0.39/min) and Alfa is supposed to follow a similar pricing. Pretty good in my opinion though the calling rates are still considered very expensive compared to the rest of the world. I just hope some day our government stops relying on this sector to fund its treasury and leaves the two operators to really compete on prices and services.

Next on the list is launching of the 3G service, let’s pray for it to arrive on time too!

Update:

Alfa also published the new rate plans for their prepaid lines which are now called “Waffer”. Thanks to Bechara.

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