IDM have updated their website with the new internet speeds and prices. Sure the slowest speed is now 1 Mbps but what’s the use when your total allotted bandwidth is just 5GB a month. Oh and that measly 5GB bandwidth which is already ridiculously small is actually the combined bandwidth of both your download and upload! Talk about useless internet. [Link]
Thanks Omar
what pisses me off the most is when i tell people about the cap, the usual ignorant response is “right now we have 2 GB limit and we never reach it, what about when it becomes 5GB??”
WHEN YOU HAVE FAST INTERNET YOU WILL BROWSE MORE!!!!!!! 5GB will be spent in 4 days!!!
i used 5GB before I even got to work this morning
yes 4 times faster internet means you will consume the 5GB 4 times faster. This is true if you do video calls. But it wont differ if you are downloading a file that is 100MB, it will just download faster with same data consumption.
The 5GB is not combined download and upload. We have 5GB download + another 5GB upload.
Wael according to the IDM website:
*Cap: It is the sum of download and upload consumption
The cap is gonna be a joke. Even with the turtle-slow internet we have now, I spend up to 10-15 Gbytes a month using free night rates.
Mark yes you are right, seems they are changing it. I just opened the link again for idm and noticed that they put another table with prices called Phase 2: New plans
not sure when they changed it, it was there yesterday including the the phase 2 prices so maybe before that
i used to have 4GB download cap (im not counting the other 4GB upload coz i barely use 10% like the rest 80% of the ppl) so now i have 20GB which is very good with 2Mb speed PLUS the unlimited night traffic
the 1MB is useless for heavy users unless they check emails and chat only…
those plans are NOT enough but wayy wayy better than before, Lebanese dont appreciate ANYTHING, even if they have 24/24 electricity they will even demand for nuclear powered electricity they never get satisfied
changes will come ofcourse 🙂
rob: just because we had really crap before and now we have a bit less crap it doesn’t make this crap suddenly gold.
If you want to compare it to what you had then you’re really not very ambition or forward thinking. Compare our connection to other countries and tell me if what we have is great or not. how is Lebanon supposed to move forward in this world when we barely can get online? How is the economy and education going to improve like this?
What mostly make me laugh, is when we heard the anouncement ” Yeaaaaaaaah , 8x faster, 4x cheaper, blablabla”
I turns out to be so far same speed, and if it will come faster you will burn more GBs, and we are paying the same money 25 $ or 50$ etc…
What is this? they are making fun of us
we cant be like other countries even if we WANT to like 100MB/sec coz we dont have a decent infrastructure, so we have to deal with till they finish installing fiber optic cables from SCRATCH
till then copper lines can’t handle REAl fast speeds just to give u an info so u wont say “3ambetfalsaf” 😉 everybody should know that
its the last 15 yrs govertemnts’ fault they didnt upgrade the infrastructure
for your information abu dhabi RECENTLY finished installing fiber optics in april being the FIRST 100% fiber optics city in the world
for us being 100% in 3 yrs is something 🙂 at least they have started im not defending anyone just to know cheers
and im not saying our connection is wow and they are doing good job with the caps
rob this post wasn’t about the speeds. I know our connection speed is limited by the copper line but whats the excuse for the limited bandwidth?
mark, the caps are meaningless figures, from a technical point of view, an ISP doesnt buy cap, they buy bandwidth..
the problem is that they dont want everybody downloading at the same time, all the time, it would require them to buy more bandwidth.. and thus the “cap” concept.. the figures here are minimal, abysmal and a joke..
i remember last year in the US, when they “downgraded” from unlimited to 300 or 250GB per month, some ppl started to complain
in Kuwait they added 2.8GB limit per day and there was chaos with campaigns against this and the parliament got involved. two months later they removed the limits.
btw we also have copper line problems in kuwait, my line can handle max 2Mbps for example. BUT, we recently got WiMAX here and my download speed is now 10Mbps
again comparing ourselves to US is meaningless since we cant do anything EVEN if we want to for NOW
the caps thing have to do with speed as “A” said without the caps there would be disaster 🙂
Rob not sure if you work for IDM or what. I’m comparing our bandwidth to the countries in the Gulf not even the US or Japan or any other 1st world country. Actually why even compare to the Gulf since you’ll just tell me they have more money, how about we compare ourselves to Egypt? While we’ve got a 5GB cap per month they’ve got 5GB cap per day (or used to have this was back in 2008).
It’s obvious caps are there because IDM purchased limited bandwidth in the first place but again why do we have such low caps? Why are IDM being so stingy, why don’t they purchase more bandwidth so we could download more?
Stop giving excuses, we are stuck in the stone age with slow internet and limited bandwidth. The whole world is moving forward, the whole world is turning digital and we don’t even have 24 hour electricity yet alone high speed internet.
Guys, these are the plans for the this month anf for existing subscribers. Check their website again for the Phase 2 plans. They have 7 plans to choose which are quite decent and much better than what we had previously.
Nevertheless, our internet is not the best in the region but the proposed plans are a farcry from what we had previously.
I’ll reserve my opinion until the end of the month to see all this internet situation turns out to be.
rob aouni.
Hassan have you checked the Phase 2 plans? The maximum amount of bandwidth per month you can get.. this is the very top of the line package and the most expensive… is 30GB a MONTH (and thats your download and upload bandwidth combined). Again this isn’t your daily cap.. it’s 30GB for the full month. And whats funny is that cap is for the 6Mbps+ connection which will zip through the 30GB cap in a few days. That still puts us wayyy wayy wayy behind countries like Egypt and it’s for $110 a month as well.
friskies judgmental.
I might understand all the technical details provided by you guys in the previous comments, but at the end of the day what i care about as consumer is to have a reliable internet service with respectful quota limit (more that 5GB for sure) and at an acceptable speed!
I don’t care how IDM is going to make profits. I know that ISPs in Lebanon are owned by the same group of investors who are acting in way that leads to a monopoly while having several company names!
In a monopoly environment the consumer can do nothing and the business is owner centric instead of being customer centric!
The Hidden monopoly in the internet sector in Lebanon contradicts with the Lebanese Economic legislation.
I think that a group of young Lebanese Investors willing to compete in the market and break all this monopoly can establish a new ISP and provide great offers for consumer while have an easy and fast shifting process (from Current ISP to the New ISP) and i’m sure that can make remarkable logical profits. Not as it is happening now ISPs with the contribution on some official parties in the Lebanese Public sector are making Inflated Profits which can be considered as Illegal !
Thanks
@rob according to my router my copper line can handle 11Mbs, I would be happy to have that while they install fiber optics.
Mark,
Whatever the Lebanese authorities come up with, it is based on making the most out of any project.
Since the internet speeds had to be increased, they limited the caps so that they charge you for every 1G extra you get to download.
There’s nothing technical about lowering the caps. It’s purely to make more money and that’s how they’ve been working.
I remember Wise giving 1GB download few years back then increased it by 500 mbytes a year later and now it’s 2GB. Meanwhile I had to recharge my Wise almost every month for an extra 500 Mbytes or 1 GB.
Nevertheless, I think we are in front of another problem now aside from the cap and more important than having a low cap. Will the infrastructure put in place handle an increasing number of Internet subscribers? How many down times and how slower will the Internet get in peak hours?
We have barely 30% of Lebanese using the Internet and this number will increase naturally.
We might not be able to use that cap cause we probably won’t have internet all the time 🙂
Najib they didn’t lower the caps.. the caps have always been low…
Now Wise/3G (telcom operators)/Mobi etc.. these guys work on a different system and have a different structure. It’s always expected from wireless providers that there will be some sort of limit. Thats even true for the US. But with DSL there shouldn’t be any limits.
I have to agree with “What do you think?”. It’s a monopoly and there is price fixing. I’m hoping once MTC and Alfa come in with their 3G that things will get better for us. Usually I wouldn’t put hope in telecom operators because they will be expensive and offer limited caps but in this situation i think it will be an exception. I think the operators will be providing more for either the same price or less than the ISP’s which I hope will cause ISPs to start providing more for us so that they can compete.
Mark,
What I meant is that the same way they decided on low caps before with the slow speeds and gradually increased them by a ridiculous amount, they made sure they keep the caps low with the new speeds so that they charge us more.
I was told ( but it’s just a rumor) that 3G service won’t be as expensive as people are expecting and will be around 15-20$ for the smallest plan but again that’s not confirmed.
@joe if u want me to be straight forward ill tell u one thing budyy, aouni ? im not a warlord worshiper like MOST of the lebanese ppl so dont u EVER tell that again and i dont work for IMD, i DIDNT say our connection is awesome
@rob, Joe ma dakhalo 😛 iza shi, defa3 3annak l zalameh
Aren’t you guys bored of politics? seriously, the war ended in 1990 and we still don’t have electricity!
Lol baracho lal Joe wou kel el 7a2 3a friskies ..
I would have taken it as an insult being called such aslan.
i mean @friskies not joe soryy
Is it true that internet costs less at night and after what time and does this apply to Ogero?
Isn’t it time you guys started boycotting the internet companies? How about not using the internet for 3 months and see if they do something about it? 😛
Annie, true in “some areas”. Some people lines “do not support unlimited nights and double speeds”. Why is however beyond my Masters and PhD in a related field! 🙂
Annie, Ogero has the simplest plan.
Whatever you download at any time during the day or in the night counts in the total allowed download cap.
And Richard, sadly most of us can’t boycott the internet since that would mean not working anymore 🙁
@Alex Just go back to offline likha! jk hehehe
But I need my Facebook fix >.<
In some regions the lines does not support double speed and unlimited bandwidth, I might understand this if we are talking about a town in Akkar, or in Baalbeck or something close to Oyoun Orghosh ! But having lines that don’t support double speed and unlimited bandwidth in Jbeil or Jounieh or Dbayeh ? well i think this is a real misery !
i got the same response for the Mazraa area in Beirut, apparently, all the “double speed and unlimited lines were all taken, all that’s left is the regular OGERO ones”.. didn’t know there was a quota there too lol
the new plans are a step forward, but the reality they still suck big time, they are trying to make it look as if we will have decent internet, which is not the case….
when it comes to speed…the 1Mbps is still too expensive, and the cap are BS, i use at least 30GB per month at home (i work all day so the usage is only at night)
and lets not mention the quota that i use up during the day!
so all in all we are still a million light years behind…i was really hoping that the new government will turn things around..but sadly everything in lebanon is about damn politics
if the cap was at 1GB per day (so 30GB per month), i think it would have been fair..
@ A
believe me 1GB a day is still very low, with the slow connections that we have and i manage to use at least 30GB only during night time, what if we get faster connection speeds, i can easily use more than 50GB a month
@JoeD, i said fair, not good
@A
not good and not even fair 😛
@A
we can resolve the issue bl sheri3 iza badak 😛
i don’t know why they rushed to talk about this and not implement it, they could have worked on this without saying anything to the media , and when it’s done do something special on the TV and directly give all the lebanese face internet.