I’ve been to Olio Pizzeria, The Chase restaurant and Empire theaters in Kaslik in the past week and I could not detect 3G in any of them. In fact, I didn’t get even get Edge. Weirdly enough, you get full 3G coverage if you go across the street from Olio to Casper & Gambini’s.

[Source]

I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that there’s been an increase in internet credit card fraud lately in Lebanon. One of them told me there’s a local payment gateway that’s being hacked consistently and that is being used by a considerable number of Lebanese websites.

I could not find any articles related to that matter, but there aren’t that many payment gateways used by Lebanese websites to my knowledge. The Lebanese websites I’ve used to buy stuff at least once and never had a problem with are playlebanon.com (Lotto website), Wise & Cyberia websites, MTC website and livingsocial.com.

There’s a guy on Elmazad offering services that include hacking into people’s accounts in Lebanon. Maybe his softwares are working after all?

Marcel Ghanem’s host yesterday on Kalam el Nass was Georges Helou, who happens to be the director of the Spitzer Science Center, and director of the NASA Herschel Science Center. You can read more about him [Here] and his work [Here].

There are 2 other Lebanese which I know of that work for NASA, Charles al-Achi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Joseph Geagea who happens to be Samir Geagea’s brother.

I am lucky to have a brother and few cousins and friends in the U.S as I can easily order my electronics from there, because to be honest, you have to be either crazy or desperate to buy them from Lebanon.

There are few decent shops in Lebanon or sales people who can get you good deals on laptops and other electronics, but most of the time, you have a high chance of getting ripped off.

I was looking for a new laptop to replace my dying Toshiba, and the price range I was looking at was between 600-800$. After some thorough research, I had to choose between a 17-inch HP laptop and a 15-inch Lenovo Thinkpad E520.

I opted for the Lenovo as it was 200$ cheaper, is more reliable and had everything I needed in a laptop. It’s a core i5 2.4 GHZ 4GB DDR3 500GB HDD for only 617$.

When comparing the prices of laptops in Lebanon, there was at least a 200 to 300$ difference between most laptops I found online and the ones I found in shops. I understand there’s shipment fees and customs and taxes but that’s a bit too much.

I have to ask here why doesn’t the government lower its taxes on electronics in general and let Lebanese retail shops be more competitive and sell more? Most people I know want to buy their electronics from the U.S because they think products are either over-priced or not good in Lebanon.

I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw a friend talking on her new Samsung Galaxy Note the other day. It looks nice and all but it’s too freakin’ big to be a phone! It reminded me of the old Nokia Communicator or one of the first Nokia cellphones except it’s bigger!

Samsung’s trying to portray it as neither being a phone nor a tablet but that’s just silly. It’s the biggest goddamn phone ever!

I haven’t been able to check my balance and 3G consumption for 3 days now. It looks like one heck of a maintenance!

When I called WISE back in October to ask about the new internet speeds and how they will be implemented, I was told we have to wait till December. I called again yesterday to see what happened and was informed that those with WISE machines can’t be upgraded to more than 1M connection and that this will cost 50$.

So basically the government issued a decree under which the minimum speed is 1M and WISE’s highest speed is only 1MB. Therefore everyone with a WISE machine is screwed and has to pay extra to get DSL now.

I am still on my 512K connection until I figure out what to do.

Internet, 3G service, mobile network coverage, everything was down since the early morning today. The reason? Still unknonw.

Now that the connection is better, you can read the article [Here].

There is an article that tackled the problem and warned of a possible crisis in the next few months but I am unable to open it due to the slow connection.

Few days ago, the internet went down due to a problem with the India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) cable. It seemed like a valid reason as it has happened before, even though we’re supposed to have a backup line for such cases. No explanation was given as to why we did not switch to that backup line.

Yesterday, the internet connection went down again and according to LBC, there was a problem with some domestic cable and not with the (IMEWE) cable. Telecom Minister announced later on that the problem is from Marseille in France and related to the (IMEWE) cable again.

Who do we believe? What was the problem and why was Lebanon only affected with it?

If anyone has credible information on that matter, I would appreciate if they’d share it.

[High Res]

However, at a press conference on Wednesday, Nadim Khater, chief commercial officer for mtc touch, said that during the company’s month-long test phase, users in Beirut saw an average download speed of 4.3 Mbps. There were only 2,000 customers testing the network.

When asked if he thought the speeds would go down as more users subscribe, he said, “Absolutely.” [Link]

The question remains: How low will the speeds get as more users subscribe? That remains to be seen in the next few weeks.

In other related news, Internet users throughout Lebanon experienced a major slow-down Monday morning, as the country lost the connection to its primary underwater India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) cable. [Link]

From what I know, there should always be a backup cable for such cases. Seems we don’t have one. It would be nice to see Sehnaoui doing press conferences when something’s going wrong, not just when announcing new releases or good news. It will definitely make him more credible if he shares the ministry’s issues with the concerned Lebanese.

Both MTC & Alfa announced plans for 3G and officially launched it but what we all missed out is that they will be ripping us off for a period of 2-3 weeks.

How is that so?
While 3G is available for all users now, the mobile internet plans have not been upgraded yet. This means that if you have a 10$-50MB GPRS connection, you will be able to use 3G but only have 50MB until the next billing date.

I have the 10$-50MB Edge connection right now on my iPhone, and I’ve consumed a total of 125MB in 6 days time, by simply texting, tweeting, checking emails, whatsapp etc …

125MB means an additional 75MB = 7.5$ extra charge, which is 75% of the original cost. If I keep going at this rate, I might end up paying some 50$, or 400% extra charge before my next billing date.

I don’t know if it’s the same way for MTC users, but that’s the case for Alfa and I found it better to switch off 3G until my plan gets upgraded. Speaking of which, the plans will not be automatically upgraded, as each user will have to call in, cancel his/her current internet package and ask for the new one.

The only positive side of all that is that we are finally getting 3G, even though I am still worried huge loads will result in disconnections and slowness, like what happened with MTC & Alfa today.

[Full Image Part1 & Part2]

Before I post about the new 3G packages officially announced by Alfa & MTC, I have to ask why doesn’t the Telecoms ministry update its website and share with us the news?

It’s like we have to search online news portals, blogs, Twitter and Facebook everytime to know what’s happening with Sehnaoui and 3G launching. Is this some sort of game or competition I am missing out on?

Added to that, instead of bombarding us with SMSes to vote for Jeita Grotto, why not inform us of the new plans?

One last thing: Is it possible that a Telecoms minister doesn’t know the difference between Megabits and Megabytes?

Check out the Ministry of Telecommunications’ beautiful website [Here]

Lebanese Minister of Telecommunications launched the 3G service officially today at the AUST University in Achrafieh. Aside from the babbling and the false hopes given to the Lebanese about becoming the leading Tech country in the world, here are the 3G rates as announced by Minister Sehnaoui:

- 19$/month for 500 MB
- 10$/month for 100 MB
- 60$/month for 1 GB ( Not confirmed though)

The prices are reasonable but the caps are honestly ridiculous specially if we are planning to use the 3G connection as a wireless connection. You can barely check your email, upload few pictures and play few YouTube videos with 500 MB!

3G services will be provided as of November 1st in Beirut and its surroundings before gradually becoming available all over Lebanon.

Update: Minister Sehanoui will hold a press conference today at AUST to explain the different phases and pricing. [Link]

Update2: 3G service will be offered for as low as 19$ for 500 MB. 10$ for 100 MB also available. Prices are ok but cap is ridiculous.

I heard the MOT minister is going to launch the 3G service officially today and that prices are going to start at 20$.

Noting that the test phase is almost over now, I hope we won’t have to wait long before the new plans are announced.

BlogBaladi took part in the report BBC did on the internet in Lebanon as I was interviewed by Howard Johnson on that matter few weeks back. Surprisingly though, they did not include anything I said but simply showed me browsing the net at the start of the report. Di3an kel hal 7ake!

For those interested, I talked about most of the issues the other interviewees mentioned but also noted that the cap given to internet users is very low, that our infrastructure might not be able to handle increasing numbers of internet users specially after the drop in prices and the speed upgrades, and that both issues could prove very problematic in the near future.