So much for this much expected internet cable that will enhance the download and upload rates and make our lifes better. Yesterday, there was a press conference at the Ministry of Telecommunications and the outcome was as expected, talks and talks and empty promises.
According to Matt Nash, a blogger on nowlebanon who attended the conference, Lebanon is still awaiting a response from Egypt indefinitly. It appears to me the Egyptians emailed us the response with a large attachment and our ministry needs few weeks to download it!
However, until we receive an answer, the government will increase in the next 18 months bandwidth at 42 Ogero central offices by 15 Mbytes, which is better than nothing.
On a final note, and this is addressed to Matt Nash, he seemed pretty upset by the addition of only 15 Mbytes and justifies his anger by giving the following example:
With a BlackBerry plan you get 50 megabits of free downloading per month. And that’s for one person, not the whole damn neighborhood. Good god.
Bandwidth rate has nothing to do with how much mbytes you are allowed to download per month. If the whole Achrafieh area has 500 users who presumably download at 512 Kps rate but can only reach 394 kps, adding 15 mbytes to the whole Achrafieh Bandwidth will allow those users to maybe reach the 512 kps as it is spread among them.
The Blackberry plan he’s talking about has 50 MegaBytes per month. What the MoT is talking about is increasing bandwidth at the offices by 15 Mbps, that’s MegaBits per second. It’s not what would make people satisfied, but, as you said, at least it would make those (low) advertised speeds closer to reality. Better than nothing…
15 Mbps (Megabits per second) in bandwidth is equivalent to 1.875 MBps (Megabytes per second) in download speed, and that increase is NOT what you will be getting at home, because this increase is to be divided among all of ogero’s internet users (and there are quite a few). So I think that the extra bandwidth available to each end user would be close to nothing… I don’t know if that’s better than nothing, because i think it IS nothing…
Am I getting this wrong?
There must be a different way of calculating this since 15Mbps would mean what? 15 users on a 1Mbps connection? And here I am in Kuwait complaining about my 2Mbps connection at home. Even my phone has faster internet than most people in Leb http://twitpic.com/287f9t