My 3G consumption as of today

Four days ago, I called Alfa to ask them about the 77Mbytes that I presumably consumed in the first 8 hours of my new cycle and I was told I only consumed 11Mbytes and I have to wait till the system resets.

I kept checking my balance daily and it reached 111.31 MB today, which means the 77MB were not removed. I called Alfa again and was told there’s nothing wrong and I did consume those 77MB on the 9th of June 2012 at 7:29am, noting that I turned my 3G on at 6:49am.

I don’t have that many Apps on my iPhone, all push notifications and most location services are turned off, I use 3G only when I am out and rarely for updates so that’s just weird. Added to that, is 3G in Lebanon that fast to download 80 mbytes in half an hour?

Nevertheless, I can’t be sure that I did consume them or not, and I don’t know why Alfa misinformed me the first time, but to be on the safe side, I just downloaded a data usage monitoring app (DataUsage).

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If you thought Lebanese tweet a lot, think again. Twitter use is very much on the rise in the Arab world, but we are still way behind Bahrain, UAE, KSA and Kuwait in terms of Twitter Population Penetration and Nbr of Tweets per month. Kuwait leads the way with around 60 million tweets in the month of March only, followed by KSA with 49 million, Egypt with 19 million tweets, UAE with 15M, Bahrain with 8M and Qatar with 5M. Lebanon sent out 2,759,000 tweets in March 2012.

In terms of new Twitter users between September 2011 and March 2012, Lebanon got 26,429 additional users, with a 137% increase. Lebanon stands in fifth position behind UAE, Egypt, Kuwait and KSA in first place.

In total, the total number of active Twitter users in Arab countries is now up to 1,311,882, which means that Lebanon constitutes 3.5% of the total Twitter population. [Source]

Personally speaking, I set up a Twitter account back in September 2010 but only started using it a year later. My username is LeNajib.

I got a message from Alfa yesterday (just like every month) around midnight that my monthly consumption was reset to 0 MB.

I logged into Alfa’s website to check the consumption today and it said I consumed 76.89 MB in the past 8 hours. That didn’t seem to be right as I only turned my 3G on an hour and a half ago and only read my email and checked in using FourSquare. I thought those 77 Mbytes could be the ones I had left over from the past month but from what I know, data consumption is reset to zero.

Anyway, I called Alfa to see what’s happening and the operator who answered me first told me to check the usage by pressing *11# on the mobile as it is more accurate than the website. I hung up and tried *11# and I got an even bigger consumption than the website!

I called again and another operator answered me, so I told her the whole story briefly. After checking her system, she told me the counters haven’t reset properly yet and my current consumption is 11 Mbytes, which makes sense. However, she could not figure out where those 77 mbytes came from.

This is not the first time I get weird numbers on Alfa, as I had the same issue when I was activating my mother’s 3G service for the first time. (Not sure if it’s the same for MTC Touch).

PS: Both operators were very friendly and helpful, and I didn’t wait too long on the line.

I attempted updating my iPhone4′s software to iOS 5.0 three months ago but it was disconnecting every time with my WISE 512Kb connection. I had to wait until I got my 1Mb DSL connection and I was finally able to upgrade to iOs 5.1 this morning. It took me 3 or 4 attempts but it finally worked!

DSL so far is proving to be much faster than WISE. In fact and since I still have my WISE connection until the end of the month, I will attempt downloading the same file at the same time and see how long it takes using each connection.

Unluckily for me though, it seems that the Apple is experiencing some technical difficulties as I am unable to download anything from the App store neither from my iPhone nor from iTunes on the laptop.

Update: AppStore and ITunes are working now.

I activated yesterday the 100MB 3G plan on my mother’s mobile. Once activated, I typed *11# and pressed Dial to check the usage and I was surprised to see I have 93.2 Mbytes left.

Where did the 6.8 Mbytes go? TVA?

WISE introduced the unlimited night usage between 12 a.m. and 7 a.m. few years back, but it was crap until DSL was launched and many switched from WISE to DSL. I remember calling the WISE guys after midnight 3-4 times a week as I would have no connection at all. (I would need it to work sometimes, not just download stuff).

Anyway, I didn’t expect a better outcome from DSL and I wasn’t wrong to think so. In fact, I tried downloading a movie on a DSL connection yesterday night and woke up to find it stuck at 5%. I downloaded it again during the day and it took approximately 4 hours for a 600Mbytes movie.

[Source]

Homeless Hotspots was a charitable innovation initiative by BBH New York in partnership with Front Steps Shelter during the SXSW Interactive festival in March of 2012. It attempted to help modernize the Street Newspaper model employed to support homeless populations for our more digital age. [Link]

I think it’s quite disrespectful to the homeless but they don’t seem to mind it given the situation they are in. Imagine the ministry of telecommunication in Lebanon hooking up 3G signal boosters and hotspots on street children and beggars. That might actually make people like them for a change and stop running away from them.

[Source]

It’s always good to know that our ex-Prime Minister Saad Hariri understands why the Internet should not be censored or controlled and will work on stopping LIRA or any similar law.

It took only a tweet and an email to fix my friend’s problem. I hope they will fix this bug in their system, but thumbs up for the great customer service.

In details, I tweeted MTC Touch about the problem linking them to the blog post and I emailed the person who helped me set up the 3G pilot testing a few months back. They replied to me within 15 minutes and told me that the problem can be fixed and activated the 1Gb plan on my friend’s number an hour later.

A friend of mine went on the MTC website yesterday to see how he can upgrade his 3G plan from 500Mb to 1Gb as he has been exceeding his consumption by some 300-400Mb every month.

Noting that he had not received his invoice statement yet nor an SMS from MTC, he followed the instructions on the website and de-activated his 500Mb plan and then moved on to activate the 1Gb plan.

It wasn’t working so he called MTC hotline who informed him that he will have to wait until the next cycle (his cycle was on the 15th) to activate the new plan and that he will have to stay a whole month without internet. Best practice is to de-activate the plan one day before the cycle ends and then re-activate it the next day.

What sort of non-sense is that? Why can’t MTC simply upgrade the plan and that’s it?

Added to that, MTC can easily make money from such customers who wish to upgrade their plans even if it meant paying extra and they say no?

The first time I called WISE to check if they are going to upgrade their internet packages was in October. Back then, they made me wait until December only to inform me that Wise machines can’t be upgraded!

I stayed on my 512K connection until WISE called me back in January 2012 informing me about their DSL packages and offering me the 150$ installation and machine fees for free, or something like that. The deal was good so I prepared all the necessary papers and emailed them. I chose the 2MB – 20 GB plan for 50$.

I was eagerly waiting to have a decent connection at home once and for all until I was informed by WISE that my phone line cannot handle more than a 1MB connection, and that I should check with the local “Central” (Government Telecom center).

Why the hell doesn’t anyone inform us about such things? Just thinking of the hassle I have to go through to upgrade my phone line, if that’s even possible, is depressing.

I guess I have to stick to the 1MB for now.

PS: I would say thank God for 3G but the service has been so crappy lately that I don’t even know where to start.

It’s been almost an hour now and it’s still hacked. [Link]

Thanks Jon

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.