Tag Archives | quality

The Queens gas station in Saida

I’m surprised this story didn’t make it to the Lebanese TVs yet. The Queens gas station in Saida is one of a kind in Lebanon since everything in this station is run by women. From pumping gas, to the small supermarket, and even the car washing.

Dressed in pink sweaters and jeans, with some wearing headscarves, the young women greet customers as they fill up tanks.

At least a dozen women are employed at the station, and the popularity for this particular niche service is growing.

The owner of the station hopes the concept helps the status of women in Lebanese society. One worker says that some people may find it odd to see women working in a traditionally male job, but that their demands for equality are a legitimate goal. Source

I have mixed feeling about this initiative… I mean it does deliver the message that women are able to succeed at something practiced exclusively by men around here. But is this the kind of stuff that women are looking to be equal at? Pumping gas is easy, I would have preferred to read a similar article on women in leading positions around Lebanon.

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Here’s to launching the 3G service 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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