Category Archives: Technology

Lebanon’s Alfa Telecom Announces 3G Packages

Alfa Telecom, one of Lebanon’s two mobile carriers, has announced its 3G packages, ahead of the service launch on November 1st.

5 packages are being offered ranging from 100MB to 5 GB in quota and from $10 to $99 in prices, as well as a pay as you go plan, which is tariffed per MB.

Alfa will also be offering data sim cards for users for dongles that connect to laptops, as well as 3G-equipped tablets such as the iPad 3G.

It is important to note, however, that you will not be able to accumulate any MBs that remain and add them up to your upcoming month’s quota. You can also continue using these plans, beyond their allocated quotas, and be charged per extra MB.

These plans are available for both prepaid and postpaid subscribers.

As for 3G coverage, starting November 1st, Alfa will have Beirut city covered, as well as most of Mount Lebanon and Tripoli, with coverage to increase in the coming months.

MTC, on the other hand, has announced it will be covering Beirut, Tripoli and Saida in its first phase starting November 1st and its packages will most probably be the same – although they have only confirmed the $10 and $19 packages.

For more info on 3G in Lebanon, you can check this post. 

3G in Lebanon: Prices, Launch Date and Testing Experience

For those who don’t know, minister of telecommunications Nicolas Sahnaoui unveiled the 3G packages we’ve all been waiting for today.

The main package will be 500MB for a $19 monthly fee.

A smaller 100 MB package for $10 exists as well for those who don’t need extensive data.

Nothing has been mentioned about more data extensive package or if there will be a package suitable for those who need a laptop 3G connection via a dongle only.

Each extra MB of consumption will be charged at 4 cents/MB.

The service will launch on November 1st in Beirut and Mount Lebanon on both carriers Alfa and MTC and will be available for both prepaid and postpaid lines.

Sahnaoui also announced that 4G will be available in Lebanon starting Summer 2012, allowing speeds up to 100 Mb/s, after the initial phase of the fiber optics infrastructure upheaval ends.

What do I personally think of the proposed plans? The $10 one (if true) doesn’t make sense. I’d rather pay double to get five times the allowed quota. But is 500MB enough with 3G? I hardly think so. It’s very easy to burn through them without knowing due to the great speed the service provides. On the bright side, the cost of an extra MB isn’t that much so it might help a little.

However, does the claim that Lebanon’s 3G is the cheapest in the region hold up? Let’s look at 3G prices in KSA:

1GB for 50 Riyals (20,000L.L. or about $13.5), 5GB for1 100 Riyals (40,000L.L. or $36), Unlimited for 350 Riyals(140,000L.L. or $93)
So we definitely do not have the cheapest 3G in the region.

However how is 3G? I can answer that question.

After testing the service for four weeks, I can attest to its reliability – especially in Beirut – on alfa. I was getting speeds no less than 2 Mbps in Achrafieh and faced next to no data interruptions using my iPhone’s hotspot feature to connect to my laptop. I’ve gotten download speeds nearing 300 KB/s, which is more than what I got using 3G in Spain. For reference, a 350 MB episode of the Vampire Diaries took me about 20 minutes to download, which is almost unheard of in Lebanon.

Cynics have been saying that the 3G speeds the 4000 testers were getting are good just because you only have 4000 testers. However, after speaking to an alfa representative, he confirmed that they were not deploying the whole bandwidth they had for those 4000 testers so it could be that when 3G becomes available for the public, speed degradations will be rare.

3G coverage in Jbeil, however, has been very spotty. I didn’t manage to get 3G almost anywhere I went in the city and the moments I did get 3G, download speed was horrible, knowing that Jbeil was one of the covered cities during the testing period.

Tripoli, which wasn’t on the map my carrier alfa provided me with, had great 3G coverage, with speeds averaging 1.7 Mbps as well.

It is interesting to note, however, that I managed to get up to 5Mbps on 3G in Sodeco area in Achrafieh:

 

Early Look into Siri on the iPhone 4S

One of the killer features of the iPhone 4S set to be released on Friday is Apple’s voice recognition assistant: Siri.

No one has seen Siri and wasn’t blown away by how futuristic it is. And for those purposes, Macworld prepared an 11 minute video showing the feature:

You can also check out this shorter video of Siri in action:

And in case you’re wondering, no, Siri will not send out marriage proposals:

RIP Steve Jobs

The world lost one of its few visionaries a few hours ago.

Today, we bid farewell to Steve Jobs, the man who single handedly moved the technological world into the future with his inventions: iPhone, iPod, iPad, Macbook…

Steven Spielberg has called Steve Jobs the “Thomas Edison of our times” and deservedly so. It’s very easy to imagine a world that didn’t have Steve Jobs – one where we’d all still be using phones with keypads that only serve their basic function, where our notebooks constantly crashed, where we didn’t feel inspired by a company  to advance in our lives and where we were content with what we had.

It’s very easy to criticize Apple. But it’s also very easy to look at what Steve Jobs did for Apple and the world and be amazed by how talented this man was and how great his achievements are.

Today we bid farewell to Steve Jobs. But the chapter in our history and present that Steve Jobs has opened will not close anytime soon. It will live on – just like the legacy of this man. It will never die.

Steve Jobs has been through the hardships of life. He was born for an out of wedlock couple, in a time where such a thing was frowned upon. He was put up for adoption. He dropped out of college. And yet, for someone who has been through so much, he sure left his mark in the world.

RIP Steve Jobs. The world will miss you. Thank you for being the great man that you are. Thank you for changing the world.

3G in Lebanon To Be Delayed and Not Launch in October?

4000 lucky people are already using the service – of which I am one – but for the rest of Lebanon, the tantalizing dream of faster internet will possibly just stay a dream.

Personally, I found the area of coverage in the test pilot to be sort of absurd. Why is it that only Mount Lebanon and Beirut are the covered areas? Shouldn’t at least Lebanon’s major cities (Batroun, Amioun, Tripoli, Saida, etc…) be covered as well to get a broader picture of how the service acts in those locations?

However, while using it in Beirut, I’ve found the service to be seamless. I burned through 30 MB of data within minutes and without knowing. And no, I wasn’t streaming on YouTube. The only drawback was something I had also experienced while backpacking across Spain and France: battery life is murdered.

I was getting speeds of about 2 Mbps, which is very comparable – and even better – to the speeds I was using on Spain’s Orange and France’s SFR. Coverage, however, even in Beirut, was still quite spotty and I found my iPhone switching back and forth between edge and 3G frequently.

But basically everyone was waiting for October to roll around so we can put the smart in our smartphones and actually have data plans that would hopefully bring the country and us forward. But it looks like it won’t happen.

Just today, Lebanon’s Shawra council, responsible to uphold whatever little law is applied in this country, has ordered the rolling of 3G services to stop. The degree itself says the delay should happen for a month. But we all know how things in happen tend to be delayed. Why? They cited “illegal” actions taken place by the Ministry of Telecommunication at the hand of both former minister Charbel Nahhas and current one Nicolas Sahnaoui.”

Change and reform, indeed.