BlogAllAlong » ISP

Qualitynet Weekly Cap Is A Myth?

Bashar — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:25:25 +0000

I hope everyone who reads this knows already about the newly enforced and contract violating cap on our internet bandwidth. Now I’ve been too lazy to update my blog, but I haven’t been sleeping on the matter otherwise trust me on that one. And while we keep losing every day our valuable bandwidth, I thought I’d save what I can save till we win this case against the Kuwaiti ISPs (#q8cap is the official tag to follow btw). So I went and changed my Qualitynet cap to weekly two days ago. You just sign a form, and I did it at Zahra Co-Op after I read another tweeter doing it. The Qualitynet guy assured me it’s working.

OK, so I log in to QStore and I see it shows my cap still as daily. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. Next day it’s still daily, and I lost yesterday unconsumed bandwidth apparently. OK! Maybe it starts next day and then accumulates. And since I couldn’t get any answer from Qualitynet support, waiting was the best I can do. This morning, same thing! I lost two days of bandwidth now. So I called, and got connected quickly. Apparently my call is important to them. Below is more or less how the conversation went, as it was long and I got put on hold 4-5 times!

Me: Hi. I signed for weekly cap two days ago and I still don’t see any change.

Him: Wait… Well I can see you have zero usage today, go ahead and use it.

Me: Well I want to know my weekly limit.

Him: System is under going update, it won’t work now. Only daily limits are applied

Me: OK… how long? By tomorrow?

Him: Not sure. Try again in 4-5 days

(Hmm… some planning they have!)

Me: And meanwhile I lose my daily bandwidth?

Him: No you can use it!

Me: What if I don’t, and next day I need 6 GB. How do I do that? You’re the one who put the bandwidth, and now you tell me I can’t save it for next day?

Him: Hang on…

(LATER)

Him: There is no weekly right now, just daily or monthly.

Me: What? I just signed a form. What kind of missed up company is this? When did it change?

Him: This is what we have. What do you want?

Me: I want weekly. I just signed up for it. When did it change? The guy told me it’s working already.

Him: There is no weekly.

Me: Then why is it available as option in the form?

Him: Who told you? Where?

Me: At Zahra Co-Op

Him: OK if he told you it’s working then it is.

Me: WAIT WAIT WAIT… I’m not here to listen to words. I need to see it. How do I know it is working?

Him: Well you have zero usage today. Go ahead and use it. You can see it for today.

Me: OK, I need it for the week. What if I hit the cap?

Him: Hang on…

(LATER)

Him: Sorry to keep you waiting. You’re on the daily plan

Me: Huh? What the hell did I sign then?

Him: OK. I will open a ticket?

(As if the ticket is something generous)

There was at least couple more waiting on the line, I just can’t recall the conversation fully. But to sum up, Qualitynet enforced illegal cap on us, offered daily, weekly, and monthly. I applied for weekly as best resort for now, but Qualitynet does not have the capacity to implement that weekly cap. And the support guy kept contradicting first saying only daily is working, then daily and monthly are available, then weekly is working for you, then no, you’re on daily. Some trust I’m building for this company.

I’m wondering if the whole purpose of the form is just to get me sign on some form of cap. I thought it about it before, but if it is, it won’t stand as a support for them, I only did it as best available option till we get this miss cleared up. It didn’t say I agree to a cap, just that I chose one, since one is already enforced anyways.

Has anyone else got his weekly/monthly cap working? Can you see the chart?

UPDATE: So I got a call back telling me the weekly cap is not in effect yet, and he’s not sure when it might be working, only daily and monthly now. I asked how come you let me sign a form for something you don’t have. He promised to get back to me. Few minutes later, he did and told me to restart my router and the weekly cap will take effect. It did, so I’m now on the weekly cap.

Clearly there is not enough education nor preparation about the different caps. Now why did I have to go to the branch? It should be doable over the phone, since they have right to change whatever they want in the contract as they claim. Beside that waste of time, I wasted another 15 minutes, and if I have not argued hard about it, I would not have gotten it.

UPDATE 2 (24-6-2011): Qualitynet never fails to get lower. One day after I got the weekly cap working I had to restart my router. Next day I find out the cap is back to daily. I call again, waste few minutes of my time to explain the problem, and demand it get back to weekly, and get compensated for the wasted bandwidth. The guy opened a ticket at noon. Now it’s 1 AM next day. Did they call or fix it? No.

MOC: ISPs should protect Kuwaiti websites?

Bashar — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 09:38:52 +0000

Ministry of Communications representative in Kuwait have made an official weird announcement following several hacks on Kuwaiti websites, stating that the ministry and it’s governmental sites are not ready against hackers attacks (invitation for hackers), and then went on to explain why they are not ready, and why they can’t protect the banks and other corporation sites in Kuwait. He concluded finally by diagnosing the problem somehow as the fault of the ISPs! Saying they should work harder, and invest in providing security mechanisms for those sites!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but what does an ISP have to do with securing someone else’s website? If my site is vulnerable for SQL Injection, how is that the fault of the ISP. If my site has weak or blank passwords, if I am not patching my server with latest updates, or if my server has so many open ports inviting hackers to come in. What part of this actually relates to the ISPs?

It seems MOC was too scared of being hacked and blamed, having no clue about website security, and the actual role of the ISPs, they go on and point fingers to their “Usual Suspect”. The ISPs.

Well then, since it’s a matter of banks security, I guess that makes YouTube second priority to ISPs and MOC. Go figure protecting our sites :). Meanwhile, we will set our passwords to blank, since it’s your responsibility.

Another Sea Cable Cut At Alexandria

Bashar — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:52:22 +0000

My friend told me there is another sea cable cut at Alexandria (Again, Egypt), and that explains the extremely unbearable slow internet today. We’ve got some great days ahead of us.

But there is one good thing from it. YouTube is technically blocked! Hey.. Is that a conspiracy? Or extreme stupidity?

Either ways dark days will come, and it will not be Happy Eid after all

Why the MOC blocked Skype?

Bashar — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:20:46 +0000

I only heard yesterday that MOC has blocked Skype. I thought of searching for rational reasons behind blocking a voice service rather than throw all my week’s burden on MOC blindly. So here goes. Why did the MOC block Skype?

1. Because it became a dating service?

But there are many ways for opposite sexes to communicate, and then they can easily just use cell phone, or any other voice service, like MSN. MSN is not blocked.

2. Because it’s one of those BAD PHENOMENONS our perliment formed an official committe of 5 (Team-5) to fight?

Nooo… Again there are lots of other VoIP services out there, and I don’t recall them raising it. They have more important things to do right? We’re talking about millions of KDs these days. You know what I mean

3. Because it eats bandwidth?

Well, YouTube is surely more bandwidth intensive.

Why then? Why? Skype has been available for years, and there was nothing against it. And just when PayPal was opened in Kuwait, and I thought we are moving forwar.. Ohhh. Wait a minute! PayPal allows you to pay for Skype PC-to-Phone credits, which then allows you to make cheap international calls, without paying anything to the ministry. Before, PayPal was blocked and payment to Skype was blocked. So now that they opened a payment option, they have to go and knock down each and every site they have, allowing payment through that gateway!

I knew there must be a logical explanation behind all of this. Our MOC won’t do things blindly and for no good reason. Ahh, now I’m relaxed. I have even came up with a better plan. To be fair for people with different tastes, who may have beenhappy with Skype and didn’t care a lot for PayPal:

6alabat email spamming their customers

Bashar — Sun, 04 May 2008 05:56:09 +0000

Last week just before the P2BK forum, I was surprised to receive 3 email spams. One for P2BK, and two others for elections. I am usually very careful where I put my email, so my best guess is one of the online sites in Kuwait I deal with is selling my email.

Today, I got this rudely and clearly email spam from 6alabt.com:

Clearly as the title says, United Networks ad coming from 6alabt.com. I usually wait to resolve the matter with the company, but this is outrageous and cannot be explained. Funny thing is I was standing at their booth last week discussing their business. They’re doing pretty good, making thousands of KD per month. But it seems nothing is good enough for them so they chose to make money out of our emails. My simple reply to them was “Why are you sending us spam email please?”

Well thanks a lot 6alabt. Now I’m neither ordering from you nor coming near United Networks. I think we should gather to build a list of Kuwait spammers to protect users from them.

Pirates At WWW’s End…

Bashar — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:51:10 +0000

“There was a time when a pirate was free to make his own way in the world wide web. But our time is comin’ to an end”

I was thinking that online piracy is a non-stoppable act. Pirates are always few steps ahead of the law and content makers. Music and movie industries kept chasing those pirates for years, in court, and through Government legislation, trying to make the ISP responsible for the content it delivers. Nothing serious happened. Just last month however, I started hearing UK and some countries are seriously considering enforcing this police act on bits traveling through the ISP channels, Kuwait it self banned 20 Bittorrent sites, but that’s just Kuwait. Now Japan ISPs them selves are bowing to the increased pressure from movie and music industries, and will ban illegal file sharing users from the internet. Using special detection software, initial warning is sent to the file sharer first, followed by cut from internet after subsequent events, and then a permanent ban is put on that user from the internet. (Just hang me if that’s the case!).

The odd thing in the story is how the pressure made ISPs take the step, without Government law mandating it. Now I don’t think that this could stop pirates for good. This is never the case I believe. There is always Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and the secured BitTorrent file sharing, but that latter I assume takes much longer time and for some people would kill the use of it. But with the increased legislation happening at country level, and from UK and Japan, US are also under tremendous pressures, things will get more difficult by the time. Anyways, the news story about Japan on Techcrunch has gotten a number of comments I’ve never seen before, 1005 so far. Go check!

Is it the right time to upgrade your connection?

Bashar — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:53:18 +0000

First of all, this post is from Kuwaiti citizen, so please foreigns just keep a blind eye on the speeds, we’re paying a lot for them!

One of the things I noted when I upgraded to 512 kbps is I was able to watch YouTube videos without waiting. Downloading goes faster than playing, so you don’t get the annoying idle waiting time. Now is there a need for extra speed if you just like YouTube? For me there is more reasons than just that, but with YouTube testing new HD streaming, this extra bandwidth could sure come in handy. Why would I download few hundreds of MB just to watch a trailer, when I can just stream it on the fly? The link shows picture of the HD and normal streaming, and tips on how to stream using HD. In a nutshell, all you need to do is add a &fmt=6 to the end of the url, like this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0&fmt=6

Add the &fmt6 to the end of any video URL you like, and you may get the HD format. Then again, maybe not. It’s only testing.

By the way, Qnet is having special offer right now double speed for same price for 256 & 512 kbps valid until mid March. Could be the only good thing in Hala February. See if it fits you. And no, I wish I was getting paid to link it :)

InCrawler blocked by Qualitynet!

Bashar — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:59:49 +0000

Again, I was trying out the list of 24 recommended meta-search engines, when I found out one of them, InCrawler, is blocked by our ISP Qualitynet. Now for those of you who may not know, a meta-search engine is a search engine that gets its search results from other multiple search engines, and combine them in a way for the end user. So they are basically a search engine, just like any other. You can search for bad offensive stuff there, or for technical or any other useful stuff. However thanks to Bojacob’s tip last time, I tried to query the site category online and it was marked as pornography. Why? I’m not so sure. Doing several searches, and looking at the main page, I could see Yahoo! main page more offending as they show some celebrity pics and stuff, when all this one does is:

Qualitynet planned outage

Bashar — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:51:02 +0000

Dear Valued Customer,

As part of the ongoing developments and enhancements to the Internet services, we would like to inform you that we will be upgrading some major elements of the Internet platform. As a result, the DSL Internet services might not be available for short period on Sunday 30^th September 2007 between 3.30 a.m. through 6.30 a.m.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconveniences caused by this important outage and thank you for your understanding and support.

For further information, please do not hesitate to contact our 24 Hours call center on 804444.

Best regards,

Customer Services – Qualitynet

We really need more of that kind of service. Planned outage is a must. Transparency with the customer is nice and builds trust.

MOC Stops New Fiber Optics Accounts

Bashar — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:26:34 +0000

According to an ISP insider, they were surprised MOC have stopped creating new accounts for Fiber Optics users and they were trying to find out why. Really depressing after everyone (even people who don’t have Fiber yet) was so happy that we finally might see an improvement. My best thought is MOC saw they are losing money or they want more money.

What else could be the problem? Unable to handle load? This is even worse! I will update the blog if I come to know of anything new.

PING…

Bashar — Tue, 01 May 2007 07:25:40 +0000

One of the challenges we face in Kuwait is fast and stable internet access. It’s not easy to get, which is why I pay $55/month for 256 DSL connection. I heard the prices went a bit down now though. Now that I have moved to a new area, I still don’t have phone lines (Fiber optics is still future in Kuwait), I had no other option but to use one of the internet services provided telecom companies. For EDGE service with Excellent reported connection status and claimed 220 kbps, this is the PING reply I got last night:

Pinging google.com [64.233.167.99] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=2152ms TTL=236
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=3176ms TTL=236
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 2, Lost = 2 (50% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 2152ms, Maximum = 3176ms, Average = 2664ms

When was the last time you saw such ping reply time of 4 digits, and from whom? from Google! with 50% packet loss. All I hardly could do is open light text based pages, after long wait! The cost of this service is 14 KD (~=$48) and they intend to be DSL replacements. In a new area at the middle of the night, I don’t expect there should be that much high traffic affecting the network. I also tried the same connection in different areas at various times. My brother changes his mind when he saw it. He was about to grab one him self. So sad really. I can’t wait to get a phone line and enjoy my life again. For now, I have spare time for some quite book reading at late nights, but that still doesn’t bring full satisfaction.

ISPs In Kuwait Blocking Specific Keyword Searches!

Bashar — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:06:30 +0000

When you think you have seen everything from ISPs, soon you realize you’re wrong. Today I was trying what is supposed to be a neat trick on Google using certain parameters to get the results you want. However instead I was rudely blocked by Qualitynet. Another proof of our superior technological advancement in fighting pornography. I immediately realized the query excluded XXX from the results (-xxx) and that’s why it was blocked. It seems right now ISPs in Kuwait are taking a new turn in blocking sites, and that is, blocking certain post parameters as a whole!

Now, regardless of how they are violating my rights as a customer, why is that xxx post parameter important? First, internet site control is always based on the site it self, not the search results that points to the sites. This is like tearing off a whole page of the glossary in a book cause it has the word porn in it. Second, there are many valid non-porn sites with xxx in them, like for example xXx the movie. As much as I hate it, I still don’t see a reason to block it, mind you that it’s not a porn movie and is rather an action movie. There is also the technical sites listing IPs like 192.168.xxx.xxx. Why would you ban those results? Third, I could be a good citizen trying to exclude the XXX from my search results, using -xxx like in my case. Or to put it in a more bad shape, a person is looking for sexual disease information, and wants to get rid of the porn site results. Simply he can’t. He must make his way through them one by one because their filtering stops even excluding those results!

I wonder for how long do we have to put up with this kind of practice, and to what point it will reach. This is why I, and I advice all of you, to always have a good proxy server ready to use whenever you encounter this stupid site blocking. It seems ISPs have forgotten that they are years behind in technology and are just focusing on eliminating more and more sites from their service. I don’t need to mention some cities have the Fiber Optics ready in place in Kuwait, but we can’t utilize it simply because there is no technology supporting it yet.

KEMS Blocks Blogger in Kuwait!

Bashar — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 07:46:27 +0000

I was just writing a long article about Blogger accounts being blocked by KEMS. Just before I hit the Publish button I thought of giving it another shot, and it worked. This still doesn’t explain the silly move of blocking it. How did this block happen? By mistake? I doubt. Either they quickly decided to roll back after the kuwaiti blogs got full of complains, or they were trying to block some specific Blogger account (for some reason) and somehow they made the mistake of blocking the whole service!

What I’m sure of is that, those kind of things don’t happen by them selves. No way the KEMS filter only would by mistake block all Blogger accounts. They must’ve been planning for something when this stupid block happened. It is worth mentioning that Blogger is the biggest blogging community online, and Google Official Blog, the blog of the world’s #1 search engine and one of the top 3 sites in the world resides there and was blocked in the move.

In the past few months, we have seen other stupid blocking moves from the ISPs, some were pushed for by the government as well. Kuwaiti blogs were blocked, political sites blocked and brought down, Meta Cafe, some of YouTube videos, and even once I saw snapshot of the official Kuwait Stock Exchange Market site being blocked by FastTelco! I wonder how that last one happened. Our neighbors, Bahrain blocked Google Earth by government orders. The decision was soon reversed however under global pressure.

It’s not yet that bad, but it’s on the way of becoming another China.

Kuwait ISPs And The Unstoppable Fall

Bashar — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:58:41 +0000

Moore’s law has always been admired and thought of to be true, even in Kuwait, if you look at it upside down that is! Moore’s law simply applies that computer technology performance will double every 18 months, and its prices will go by half in the same amount of time. Over the years, we have managed somehow to move from dial-up connections to DSL faster ones, for much higher price. Currently a 256 kbps costs average of $57 a month. We have had this before 2002 and if you want to get the highest, 1.5 Mbps, it will cost you over $440! can you imagine. Even with a DSL, what we are getting in the end is real slow connection. Our service is dependent on a sea cable that gets affected by constructions in UAE, and there is no backup for it. While in early 2000, when I used to search Google, if I blink I will miss the refresh, right now I sometimes refrain from searching and browsing to cut-down wasted time, while I should be really enjoying a faster connection than others.

Isn’t the ISPs doing anything to overcome the problems? Yes sure they are. They have come up with a unique solution to overcome customer problems. By they here, I am referring to the employees not the company it self. Qualitynet for instance does a brilliant job when there is a problem with their connection. It’s true it has been extremely slow for over a month, but just a few days back when it went completely dead I thought of wasting my time a bit and give it a hopeless complain try. When I called I got a smart IVR saying “We cannot take your call in the meantime”! What they do is that, whenever there is a problem with the connection, they switch on the IVR to stop incoming customer complains. When, and IF the problem is resolved, then you can talk to customer care only! How ridiculous. I mean, if they were really going to resolve the issue in 1 hour that’s fine, but this is an on going issue and this is there way of coming over it. Just block customer complains. In the name of God, if you are not going to take customer calls at downtimes, when are you going to take it then? I haven’t tried Fasttelco, but my friends never spoke a good deal about it either.

This lack of improvement have opened the door for outsiders to compete with them in their own game. Telecom companies are hot on the 3G and Beyond 3G technologies, giving customers 1.8 Mbps for 20 KD ($68). If what they are promising is true, and they can maintain it, why should anyone go and pay 17 KD ($57) for 256 kbps, when they can get 7 times the speed, more reliable for just $11 extra. Now, some areas in Kuwait are being equipped with Fiber Optics, but you know what the problem is? The technology is still not there to use it.
For the good of all readers, please do share your experience and recommendation if you have any on this topic.

BlogAllAlong » ISP

Qualitynet Weekly Cap Is A Myth?

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