Shami's Blog

Lately ISPs have been bombarding us with all sorts of Internet related ads, promising “high speeds” or “unlimited downloads”. Osama Hajjaj said it best with this comic:

I want to get a few things straight before we move on

• Since what you’re paying for is essentially shared bandwidth, it can never be “unlimited”. ISPs need to make money as well, so they can’t let you hog their bandwidth, but in the case of ADSL, unlimited downloads during the night is possible because most users are asleep, and those few heavy downloaders won’t affect the mostly un-utilized ISP uplink
• For the same reason as above, what ISPs are advertising is a best case scenario, so there are times when you will be facing slowdowns. Reasons for slowdowns differ for each technology used. With wired being superior to wireless.
• A respectable ISP will minimize those slowdowns as much as possible. Zain failed in this respect with WiMAX, let’s hope the same doesn’t happen to their HSPA+ service
• ISPs try to sell a lot of corporate bandwidth, which is very profitable, then try to use that bandwidth during the night for residential users to minimize costs.

A question raises itself, do we really need all this speed? The FCC defines “broadband” as having 4Mbps or more, looking at the Jordanian market, most people are below 1Mbps, so maybe 80% do not have broadband. Another question raises itself, does it really matter? No, for most people anyways.

Let’s look at how Jordanians use the Internet, most people only use it for browsing, email, the occasional photo sharing, and in rare cases, video streaming.

Even for the pickiest of users, the difference in speed is only noticeable up to the 2Mbps mark, the above uses will not change the experience for anybody. Most websites are not properly built so they’re slow, and video streaming (for standard definition) will buffer faster than playback speed, so it won’t be of any benefit to the user. Even for those who use the lower speeds, they don’t really care.

Why then, you ask, do we need “proper” high speed Internet? The answer is simple, downloads. If you’ve ever waited on a file you need for work to finish downloading, you’ll realize why high speed is nice to have. I personally download a lot of ISO images to test numerous system configurations, I also download the actual programs to perform the required testing. Having to wait 15 minutes for a 70MB file is never good. I had to switch from FreeBSD to Ubuntu Linux for my prototyping needs because Ubuntu requires much less downloading. If I had 8Mbps (Been 3 weeks since I paid Orange for an 8Mbps account, which I’m still waiting for) instead of my current 1Mbps the download would take about 2 minutes, which is OK by all standards. If you download TV shows or movies, the problem becomes even worse; A 20 minute HD video is about 650MB, that’s a 3 hour download on a 1Mbps connection, with 8Mbps, that’s 20 minutes, a BIG difference.

Up until recently, there were no cheap Internet connectivity options. Or let me rephrase, no cheap “decent” connectivity options. 13JDs for a 128Kbps is not considered cheap, for an option to be considered cheap in Jordan, it’ll have to cost around 5-10JDs a month and it definitely has to be faster than 128Kbps to allow the occasional Youtube streaming without having to buffer for 15 minutes. For those who only used 2GB a month (yes, those people exist), they had to pay 30+JDs for 10-15GB which they never used.

After the introduction of WiMAX back in 2007, prices went down, but not much. Orange still had dominance over the market for 2 reasons; They were the only company that bought bandwidth from international ISPs, and their networks were far superior to WiMAX given the fact it’s wired, so the others were unable to match Orange on terms of speed. Not to mention that Orange’s network has been here for ages, which allowed them to upgrade it while still making money, which cannot be said about the others.

Now comes the primary reason for this post, Zain’s HSPA+. Now that Zain has come with a somewhat reasonable alternative, which had various options depending on your usage levels. Starting from 6JD for 1GB up to 49JDs for 30GB. Those should suffice the needs of about 97% of Jordanians.

I was given a 1 month subscription along with a 21Mbps dongle, the Huawei E367, which was surprisingly Linux compatible. Zain gets extra points for this particular selection.

The frequency used by HSPA+ is higher than GSM, which means GSM has better signal penetration. In my house, I can barely make voice calls. So when my phone barely picked up the signal I wasn’t surprised. I thought the dongle would have better reception than the phone, sadly that wasn’t the case. But if you look at any wireless technology, those don’t really work with the buildings we have in Jordan. If you have heat insulation you will most probably not get any good signal indoors.

When Zain first released the service I faced a lot of dropped calls and broken messages, but I haven’t faced them as much lately, I guess this comes with being an early adapter. I do however keep my phone on GSM most of the time to make the battery last longer, and to make use of GSM’s better coverage.

To do some testing, I took the laptop to the roof and tried to connect, sadly I only got 2 bars, very disappointing, but that gave me about 4Mbps download (no screenshot for this one folks, sorry).

Then I went to a coffee shop in Swiefeyyeh to try it out, 2 bars as well. I also assume this is because the network isn’t a 100% ready, so hopefully it’ll be better in a month or 2., but this time I gotGood, but still not as good as the advertised 21Mbps, I assume this is because Zain’s network is still new, and you’ll need to have a full signal to at least have a chance of getting the full speed. Downloading from a dedicated server gave me about 900-950KB/s, very good.

Then on the way home I bought a USB extension cable, upon arriving to my desk, I connected the dongle to my laptop using the cable, and thew the dongle out of the window, this time I got 2 bars, and the following speed:

This was OK. Download speed from the dedicated server got to about 300KB/s, good.

Now for the most important usage of this connection, browsing. To be honest, I was very disappointed at first, because page load times were not that of connections that get the speeds above. After a few minutes I changed the DNS settings on my connection to Google’s 8.8.8.8 servers and browsing was much better afterwards.

I’ve noticed that Zains’ DNS servers have been slow ever since WiMAX, they use BIND which is one of the most popular DNS servers on the Internet, I assume they’re running it on some Linux distribution. I’m not a big fan of that particular setup. If someone at Zain reads this, please try using NSD for authoritative servers and Unbound for your caching servers, also try installing them on FreeBSD, which has a much better TCP/IP stack implementation.

Youtube was slower than I expected, but still fast enough, although I didn’t try watching HD video, so your mileage may vary. I also noticed the dongle becomes warm after some time, wasn’t very impressed with that.

OK, to the conclusion, is this worth buying? For me, it was a bit underwhelming, but for a lot of people, they’ll find it does the job. I would stay away from it if there a is commitment involved, but if you can cancel your contract if Zain starts messing up then by all means try it. No commitment means Zain has to keep the service working well to keep the customers.

For people like me who download a lot, I say stick with DSL, it’s still a better option. Given the fact it’s not very good indoors, at least in my house, I wouldn’t bother with it for anything other than a secondary connection when at clients, if it actually works.

My personal experience with Zain is that the service will be great at the beginning, but then the network will get congested and they won’t bother upgrading. Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen with HSPA+. Note however that their network is very young, and they have built it in record time. So facing these issues at this time is normal, let’s hope they make it better, not worse.

Oh, and if you get it, make sure you don’t deplete your download quota, and check it frequently. If you end up using a lot it will be VERY expensive.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a few weeks but was very busy, I finally got the time to do so.

If you know me, you’ll probably know I’ve been struggling with my Internet connectivity since 2005. I’ve been begging Orange (Jordan Telecom Group at the time) for anything faster than 512Kbps, but I was always told that my area was not covered. I live in an area filled with students who don’t have phone lines, and the very few people who use DSL here are content with the speeds Orange was offering. So Orange did not bother upgrading my area because it wasn’t worth it.

I’m not a big fan of wireless technology, so even when Umniah and WiTribe released WiMAX in 2007 I wasn’t keen on switching even though my DSL was disconnecting on weekly basis because of the horrible cables running from the exchange to my house.

I’ve had a Zain mobile line since 2004 and I absolutely love it, unless something major goes wrong, I won’t be switching any time soon, so when I heard they were launching a WiMAX service I decided to pay the premium and go with them (About 38JDs for the 2.4Mbps account per month), assuming their WiMAX service will at least be as good as their GSM service, and assuming they will give me the same level of support they gave me as a GSM customer.

So on April 6th 2009, I went and signed a contract, with a sales lady named “R”, who was very happy to answer my calls and help we with every question I had. But things changed when I had paid. After taking the CPE home I realized that the insulation in my house was too strong that WiMAX signals and the CPE was not working unless I had the “Abajoor” open. I tried calling R but she stopped answering her phone, so I tried calling support.

After some tuning I managed to get everything to work properly, the download speed was never slower than 280KB/s, it was like a dream come true. I finally had a “proper” Internet connection.

For those who don’t know, the WiMAX network Zain was using is owned by Mada, which is partly owned by Zain. Mada was supposed to concentrate on the network and corporate sales while Zain was supposed to handle retail. Mada’s relationship with Zain provided the former with a good amount of towers to install their base stations. The result was a truly stable network with excellent coverage. Even in terrible weather.

Zain’s policy of selling the CPEs kept the number of users minimal, if memory served me right, the USB dongle was about 100JDs and the CPE was about 150JDs, which not everybody could afford. Also, Zain made customers commit to yearly contracts, so you couldn’t skip a month or 2.

7 months later, things changed. Mada and Zain got into a disagreement and Mada opened its own retail shops. They offered the CPE for free if with yearly accounts and the USB dongle for free with quarterly accounts. They also had prepaid cards which allowed people to use the service whenever they wanted. That was very appealing to the students in my area. So suddenly the towers in my area became congested.

The download speed dropped from 280KB/s to 15KB/s, the equivalent of a 128Kbps connection, which cost 13JDs a month at the time. I tried calling support to get a solution, they always said that my account was not 2.4Mbps, it was “up to” 2.4Mbps.

As someone who has worked in 2 ISPs I know the reason for this “up to” thing; Since home users can’t pay the actual price for bandwidth (About 200JDs for 1Mbps), this bandwidth has to be shared between multiple people, this means speed is not guaranteed and during peek hours you will not get the full speed advertised. It is only a best case scenario.

2.4Mbps amounts to about 302KB/s, and accounting for protocol overhead you will lose anything between 13-16%, so you get 260-270KB/s as a maximum. It is totally acceptable to get speeds of 170 to 200 during peek hours.

But getting 15KB/s ALL the time was ridiculous. What made matters worse is the fact pinging the WiMAX gateway which is inside Mada’s network took anywhere up to 6 seconds. To put matters into perspective, the normal ping time is about 60 milliseconds which is 6 seconds divided by 100. This meant that even browsing was way too slow, as every request sent had to wait 6 seconds.

The solution was simple, Zain and Mada could have installed new towers or upgraded the existing ones. But nooooooooooooo, that would have cost them money. Whenever a customer care employee didn’t answer with the “up to” response I got “we’re working on it”, or, “It’s your PC”, or “It’s the CPE”. Testing the CPE at 4AM (The time with least Internet traffic) gave me consistent 270KB/s, so it was definitely neither my CPE nor my PC. But it was (According to Zain’s support) never Zain’s problem, another common response was “Nobody else complained, it’s just you”. I knew a few people in my area who complained, but it seems they don’t exist in Zain’s fantasy world.

My brother and I are very heavy users, the 25GB quota I had on the WiMAX connection wasn’t enough, so we also have a 1Mbps DSL line, which was working at about 600Kbps, a little better than getting a 512Kbps package.

My cousin, who is my next door neighbor, got fed up with Orange and threatened to complain to the TRC, Orange came the next day and connected him to a digital cabinet 200m away from our house (Orange didn’t agree to connect me to that particular cabinet saying it doesn’t cover my street) and now he was able to get 8Mbps.

This made me furious, at first Orange ignored my requests to be hooked to that cabinet, and I was stuck with this horrible WiMAX service that Zain didn’t bother to fix (Why would they? I’m but a mere customer, the least important aspect in any business). I decided to call the TRC, 3 days later Orange connected me to the same cabinet and the 1Mbps became much faster than before.

Mysteriously Mada somehow fixed something so I was then getting better speeds, but by no means consistent, speed was anything between 70 to 150KB/s. And even on a good day, browsing on the 1Mbps DSL was faster for light websites.

Seeing that I finally had a proper DSL line, it was time to disconnect the horrible WiMAX that hasn’t been working properly (Except during university vacations). But of course Zain had me on a contract, and said I can’t terminate without paying a penalty, which is the subscription till the end of my contract. So I decided to wait a little on disconnecting the WiMAX connection since I’ll be paying for it anyways, so I might as well use it.

In February things went down the toilet, download speeds were as low as 15KB/s again and I had my CPE off for about 3 weeks as the connection was utterly useless. When I went to disconnect the line Zain had the audacity to say “Even though the speed is horrible, that doesn’t mean you can break the contract”. What the Hell? What kind of respectable company says that to a customer?

After I voiced my intentions of not renewing my contract with Zain, I got 4 calls from them in 3 days. I wonder where they were when I was having problems :/

Both people who talked to me tried to convince me to switch to HSPA+, saying they can offer “up to” 21Mbps. Of course my response was “You couldn’t deliver 2Mbps, how can you expect me to believe you can deliver 21? I do not trust Zain as a data provider, and whenever someone asks me if they should subscribe with your service, I advise against doing so, saying you will twist their arms with the commitment period, and then you won’t deliver what you promised. Don’t bother calling me again, I’ve already given the CPE to a friend of mine who is willing to use it till the commitment is over, and I signed a contract for an 8Mbps account in addition to my current 1Mbps line”

I’m not the only one complaining, just take a look at Zain’s Facebook page and you’ll see a lot of people complaining about the horrible service.

Orange isn’t much better, but at least with Orange, if you’re connected to their fiber network, it works, and it’s consistent.

Zain does indeed have the potential to do something really good. I only wrote this post to grab their attention and at least get enough support to force them to stand behind their service and make it a proper alternative to Orange, not just give a half assed service as they did with WiMAX.