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Internet Kuwait News

No more download limits!

Earlier today I tweeted that one of my sources told me that they were canceling the download caps and it looks like it’s true. Taken from the KUNA website:

In a move that would please all internet users in Kuwait, Minister Information and Minister of Communications Salem Al-Uthayna announced Thursday that his ministry issued new regulations obliging internet providers to cut the cost of internet subscription and remove the download limits on users.

The Minister said that the ministry officials have held intensive meetings with internet providers to review the cost and quality of the services provided to internet users in Kuwait. “The internet has become a cornerstone in development, economy and everyday life in Kuwait,” Al-Uthayna said.

Following this meeting, the ministry obliged internet providers to upgrade the quality of their services and to cut prices as of next month. The minister vowed to start new stage of close monitoring and accountability for internet providers to make sure to protect the rights of subscribers. [source]

Finally some great news although I do hope that means everyone in Kuwait will get fiber optics or else I’m still stuck with my phone lines max speed which is just 2Mbps…

81 replies on “No more download limits!”

I hope by saying that the ministry will lower their prices otherwise the only thing this will achieve is running the ISPs out of business which means no internetz at all

my internet is expieing this moneh i think after 10 days should i renew or not? please help me 😀

utfffo 3la Qualitynet…bunch of losers

You’ll always lose cause of your illegal business practices. Next time you instigate a price-fixing campaign or any anti-competitive practice, i hope they shut you down.

And thanks Mark for covering the issue in a balanced manner. If it wasn’t for popular blogs like yours people really wouldn’t be able voice their opinion.

They ministry can say whatever they want, I seriously doubt the ISP’s will oblige. The whole internet cap was illegal anyway, what’s another new law to them??

They get their internet from the Ministry anyway so if they wanted to the ministry could turn off an ISP completely.

While what you’re saying is technically true, the ISP’s know that realistically, it’ll never happen.

٦ شهور من يوم رفع الأسعار وتونا نسمع عن القوانين يعني ٦ في ٣٠ يساوي ١٨٠ يوم كم اشتراك جديد وتجديد صار من يومها!!!!
أنا اقول اذا كان الدولة تقول اللي صار اصلا خطأ ومايجوز، ليش ما يرجعون الزيادة لنا او يعطونا بدالها اشهر اشتراك مجاني مقابل السرقة اللي تمت!!
يعني اذا الحرامي سرقك من يرجع فلوسك؟

The ISPs are greedy and they get away with what they can because they can.

The Q8 cap campaign – bloggers, twitters, etc were really great at spreading the word and makin this an issue. They should continue to demand that ISP and MOC push for better services and prices.

MOC must formulate an efficient fiber optic plan for all of Kuwait and liberalize the market allowing foreign conptetition to enter such as BT or virgin or etisalat.

Speaking of fiber, does anybody know of a reliable source where I can find out what parts of Kuwait currently have the fiber optics installed??

There is an office at ministry of comm. for the fibre optics installation opposite Honda garage Canada Dry street. Their number is 24813781/888 ext 123 you can find out and submit your request for installation for GPON (fibre optics) and may the force be with you 😉

Yeah and after what? After knowing all about their dirty schemes, lies and stealing? Seriously, removing the cap is a no brainier.

They should refund us all with a better speed & knocking down the prices for good. MOC should also extend more wires and upgrade everything for good so that the people who get affected with old wires would have that problem no more.

Also,PLEASE for the love of god learn to make a customer service that is worth calling for, unless we want to hear “unplug and plug the router 100x times” and also “i’ll file a complaint but LOL he will never come!!!”

These ISP’s lied to us, disrespected us and thought less of us. We deserve much better then this and looking everywhere else in the world including the middle east, we are really lackluster sadly. Heck, they don’t even return to your questions and their twitter accounts is deserted, LOL. If you were to negotiate with them on facebook they will just delete your reply like its nothing.

In my opinion, i would have no problem in making a lawsuit and collecting as many people as i can to file aswell, this way changes will happen and fastly.

Oh boy, lots of people are going to have to be compensated for this.

Lawyers are going to have a ball with this.

Great. This does no real good. My connection speed is too low to download anything anyway. Now it will be even slower becuase no one cares how much bandwith they use up.
Atleast my favorite DVD shop will have all the latest bootlegs again.

This is not the end for the internet campaign. ISPs maybe will lower their prices, but only by 25%, after icreasing it by 70% at infoconnect, source from newspapers. Atleast the internet cap is removed for now. But now we will continue to fight for the rest and its the most important.

1. To establish the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), in order to properly monitor the internet companies.

2. To open the door to new ISPs and to issue internet licenses to Viva, wataniya, zain since they buy internet from ISPs currently.

3. To upgrade the cables to fiber optics in every house in Kuwait.

4. To upgrade the submarine cables between kuwait and uae or qatar to reach the internet speeds of 100Mbits.

Exactly, we deserve more, Not lies and disrespect. We can be so developed in many things, i don’t know why we have to fight or question things just for them to be better.

9a7 lisaank. It’s like we have to beg for things to be better and developed. Shows you how much people really do “like” this place.

Exactly, let’s keep the shit storm coming down on them.

I dedicate this victory to the top secret ISP dude from a few posts back who shared with us their BS, sorry I mean point of view

Down with the ISPs, free the Internet

A Little warning To anyone wanting to open new subscription, to MADA , their customer support and service is @#$@#$ and they have problems they can’t fix, for the past week they been giving me some that they have some problem and this is why my internet speed is slow , while my next door neighbor , has no problem .

I hope they upgrade their internal infrastructure. One small benefit of the download caps was that when I did have unthrottled bandwidth I could finally watch Youtube without buffering and the pings were low. I’m afraid things will go back to shit once they remove the throttling. I hate the caps, but I also hate slow internet. A more reasonable cap of 10GB/day would be a good middle ground compromise.

Of course none of this would be needed if those useless ISPs upgraded their shit!

From what I read in the Arabic newspapers nothing has changed except the wording, from “Fair usage” to “Abusive usage” with a vague reference to lowering the rates by “up to” 25%. In short, everything is SAME SAME, so don’t light up your cigars yet.

I am outside Kuwait now and I have a speed of 35 Mbps (real speed not “up to”). I downloaded 28 HD movies in one day. No caps, no nothing. Why is that? How come this can’t be done in Kuwait?

I think the UN should declare access to the Internet as a human right. Maybe this will get our government to do something about this “Cap” and “up to” nonsense.

End of sermon.

Internet as a human right?? LOL
Well if you’re gonna ask for that, I wanna ask for the UN to force governments to also supply a new phone + new tablet + new laptop, yearly, for each citizen as a human right.
Who needs autonomy, self-dignity & respect to others in a world like that?

Finland already does treat internet as a human right, everyone gets a free 2mbps line. In Egypt recently people took to the streets when the internet and phone lines were cut so yeah at this point I’d say it’s a human right since cutting it is usually a government censorship thing

But it is not free in Finland – just like it is in Kuwait.
It just means that (almost) everyone in Finland has the right of access to internet… Same in Kuwait.
So what’ll change if they made internet in Kuwait a human right? It is still accessible to (almost) everyone.

That being said, unlike Finland, we are getting robbed by the ISP’s with the prices they charge.

Great News. I applaud all the Kuwaiti’s ministers who stood their ground for us. May God bless them abundantly.

Screw the ISP’s for messing around with us. They really thought they could take us for a ride again. May they burn in hell.

WE NEED A GOVERNMENT ISP!

Think about it, the MOC already gets the cables from the outside and rents them to local private ISPs they in return charge us ape-shit prices with caps! The ISPs are really middle men in this equation and they seem to be calling the shots! I say get rid of the middle man as an option and give us government subsdedized internet connections since the framework already exists! With Government ISPs you will stimulate competition between the private sector and only then will we ever see the “real internet” in Kuwait.
WIthout a government ISP the big 4 private ISPs will continue to take us for a ride as we do not have another option.

We should urge MPs to pressure the MOC into giving the public a government sponsored ISP alternative. This in return will create more jobs and increase compeition within the internet sector and the customers will be happy. Customer satisfaction is what both sectors should really aim for, not his wallet.

An additional thought. I believe it’s an insult to the consumer’s intelligence to advertise “up to” 42 Mb when you cannot really use that speed even if you do get it. What am I going to do with 42 Mbps when there is a cap of 2 gig? It’s like giving someone a Ferrari and asking him to drive it fast in the middle of sand dunes!

Using 42 Mbps means multimedia (movies, gaming, live video chatting) not just web browsing and emailing. For the latter, 1 Mbps is more than enough, whereas multimedia means downloading 10s of gigabytes an hour.

In short, having a phony 42 Mbs with caps is like having a sports car with no roads.

In hindsight, I did the perfect thing renewing my subscription only for 3 months on 24 May 2011.

Waiting for the new prices to kick in by Ramadan.

Qualitynet are operating without a license, overpricing for poor capped service with lousy customer service, and breaking the law through price-fixing. I have no idea why they haven’t been shutdown.

Only in Kuwait.

In the states comcast would cap me, be overpriced and EVERYONE complained about the customer service. Just type in anything negative about comcast and watch how many complains pop up on google.

It’s called Wasta my friend, and it’s above the law. Pretty much all major companies here are above the law or have written the laws themselves for their own gain thanks to their friends/relatives in the govt. It’s just how the country works.

Since this is taken from KUNA, I’m not surprised that the translation is WRONG.

According to your post, the news said “that his ministry issued new regulations obliging internet providers to cut the cost of internet subscription and remove the download limits on users.”

WHILE THE TRUTH IS the minister regulation only oblige ISPs to remove the data caps and does not talk about reducing internet subscriptions of end users. YES it mentioned reducing internet charges that the ISPs pay (the fees mentioned in the documents that Mark published couple of days ago) and that will not affect us.

So in short, and as expected.. the only winners here are the ISPs. Since we will continue with the same internet service at the same speed and capacities that we paid for in first place, except now we’re no longer for improvement or price reduction since now we feel glad for what we have in first place! The only winners here are the ISPs who used us as a mean to get the fees that they pay down. And by the way, considering how much they make us pay for internet, I don’t really think that the fees they pay is exaggerated or expensive.

And by the way, we still didn’t get to read the Minister document, it may have asked ISPs to remove the caps from existing customers… there is a very good chance that the Minster regulation DO ALLOW ISPs to set capping upon renewal or new subscription.

As you are aware data cap do exists with mobile phone providers such as zain, wataniya, and viva.. they were not included with this regulation… my guess its because they already informed their customers of the data caps before people signed up for the service.

My friends, this is Kuwait.. I find it very hard to believe that the government is on the citizens side. And i’m speaking out of past experiences, just look back at our news and you’ll understand.

The internet is still capped… just called Gulfnet and my 2mbps (with 24mbps plus) is capped at 3.8 GB per day…

KUWAIT CITY, July 15, (KUNA): Kuwaiti Internet-providers are set to lower their charges for the service by 15-25 percent, Ministry of Communications Undersecretary Abdulmohsin Al-Mazidi said on Friday.
After a meeting between the ministry and Internet-providers in the country, Al-Mazidi said that agreement had been reached between the parties, whereby a recently company-proposed policy called ‘fare usage’, will not see the light.
The policy, said to be proposed by companies, called for a download limit for users that if exceeded, would automatically release lower speed and bandwidth.
The agreement will be effective as of one week of its signature, which occurred during the meeting, added the ministry official.

The agreement applies to each of the four Internet companies in Kuwait; FASTtelco, Qualitynet, Gulfnet Communications and KEMS.
Earlier, in a move that would please all Internet users in Kuwait, Minister Information and Minister of Communications Salem Al-Uthayna said.
“The Internet has become a cornerstone in development, economy and everyday life in Kuwait,” Al-Uthayna said.
Following this meeting, the ministry obliged Internet providers to upgrade the quality of their services and to cut prices as of next month.
The minister vowed to start new stage of close monitoring and accountability for Internet-providers to make sure to protect the rights of subscribers.

Guys,

I hated the internet cap idea, but I hope the ministry has been fair with the ISP’s as well.

As per Mark’s post sometime back the ISP’s seemed to have issues about the government not providing them the necesarry links they need to expand.

I hope the government has done something about that, else we will have everyone using the same bandwidth + more users everyday = impending DOOM!!!

So today my bro and I set a game from Steam to download and after about 2-2.5gb of downloading the speed of the internet dropped from 210 kb/s to 50 kb/s and won’t go above that.

Cap is still intact. Wonder when it will be removed? But after reading some of these comments maybe it won’t be removed at all.

Same problem here. My downloads won’t go above 35kbps. Really frustrating considering I don’t download much at all, and the cap was hit because I legally downloaded something off of Itunes.

I just downloaded a 7GB game from steam today and my internet speed has not dropped at all. Has the caps been removed?

I have a zain ego 13.5 kd connection, and it wont go above 30 kb/s in peaktime usually it is 8 kb/s
and go slow as 2 kb/s .

where can I complain about ISP? qualitynet downgraded my speed and the helpdesk guy says that it is because of FAP which is still in place. What can I do about it?

Anyone having net issues again?
I’ve had high pings in everything throughout today
Called my ISP but response is always the same “Your internet is working fine.

PS:I’m on Gulfnet.

MY dl speed is so slow it was impossible for it to be cut even after i passed my limit. 512kb/s line and 60kbps download speed.

is there way to hack download limit
per day for viva users ??

my download speed 7.2 viva router
download speed : 600kps

but after pass download limit (2 gb) per day
speed go down to 20kps

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