Tag Archives | bandwidth

OGERO #UnleashTheSpeed – Test Results in Achrafieh

Today marked the third day in Ogero’s “Unleash the speed” tests for subscribers in Beirut, and among the exchange offices that were included today is the Achrafieh exchange office, so I passed by one of my friends there in the area to test the “unleashed” bandwidth myself!

I eventually used speedtest.net and picked a server in Lyon that I usually use to test my home connection. I performed numerous tests and was impressed by the download speed which was consistent at ~6.5Mbps (3 times the subscription original speed), however the ping latency varied from 90 milliseconds as shown above up to 300 milliseconds, it’s worth noting though that ping to local servers at Cyberia and Connect was consistently less than 50 milliseconds.

Assuming the subscription fees will remain unchanged or hopefully decrease, the speed upgrades are much welcome but the latency thing should definitely be reduced to provide a better experience for online gamers. Aside from that, the ultimate challenge for Ogero will of course be to cope with the increasing demand on bandwidth once they remove the speed caps for all subscribers. People are currently barely getting the speeds they are subscribed to, so increasing line speeds without having the necessary bandwidth to cater for the users is going to be pretty disappointing.

Anyway, I don’t want to be pessimistic about the upgrade plan, but let’s just keep our fingers crossed until it is all done.

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Here’s How Netflix Fails in Lebanon

netflixhome

Soon after Netflix launched its service worldwide I quickly signed up for a free trial to see how good will the streaming be over our lousy internet connection, and I was unsurprisingly very disappointed with the experience.

I have a 2Mb connection, and I was never able to stream a show in HD, the maximum resolution I was getting was probably 360 or 480p despite setting the playback parameters in my account to only play shows in HD. A friend of mine who has a 4Mb was also failing to load anything in high quality. And judging by the figures Netflix posted on their data usage, the results seemed pretty reasonable since 1 hour of HD streaming consumes up to 3GB, so there’s no way you can get that quality unless you probably have an 8Mb subscription.

netflix

Therefore until the internet infrastructure gets a massive upgrade here in Lebanon you’re better off without a Netflix subscription. And even if you managed to get a super fast connection, you should know that the Middle East’s catalog is different than that of the USA and lacks some of our favorite shows like House of Cards for example due to licensing issues. To get over that you’ll have to resort to using some VPN service all over again to cheat the geographical restrictions.

So basically just ditch the idea of subscribing to the service and keep that torrent client installed in your PC for the time being.

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Free internet quota at night for everyone?

Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui announced on twitter yesterday that unlimited internet quota from 12AM to 7AM has been approved by the government and will be activated as soon as the decision is published in the official gazette.

Some ISPs already have the unlimited night traffic offered to some of there users depending to which telephone exchange office they’re connected. My parents subscription with IDM in Beirut for example gets double the speed and unlimited traffic at night, while my IDM subscription in Aramoun doesn’t because they claim it didn’t pass some “feasibility test” that was performed.

Anyway, I hope it doesn’t take too much time before we get that feature activated for everyone!

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