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First Impression Internet

Zain Beam – First Impression

Around ten days back I asked if anyone had tried the Zain Beam internet service and a few of you responded with high praise for the service. Zain also read my post and got in touch with me with an offer to try the service for a month, so I jumped on the opportunity and yesterday they installed Beam at my place.

The installation process is supposed to be fairly simple, they install an antenna on your balcony or the roof of your building, and then run an ethernet cable to your apartment where they hook it up to an LTE modem. In my case the installation process was slightly more complicated and took around an hour and a half because they were having trouble finding a strong signal. My building which back in the 90s was the tallest in the neighborhood is now surrounded by much taller buildings and so it was difficult to find a good signal. Thankfully, just as I was about to give up hope, they found a spot on my roof with ample signal and then ran the ethernet cable from it down to my apartment.

First impression? It’s fast! I asked for the 20Mbps connection and I’m getting around 30Mbps which is similar to what other people are reporting. What’s also great is my upload speed is between 10-20Mbps.

This right now is the fastest connection I’ve ever had at home and it feels strange because I’m so not used to having a fast and stable connection at home. YouTube videos play instantly as well as HBO, Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. The video quality from the streaming services also looks to have improved because of my now faster connection. I also managed to update all the apps on my two ipads plus two macs really quickly. I know all this sounds very normal, but you have to keep in mind, my connection for the past year or so has been terrible and I now finally feel like I have fast internet like a normal person.

For those of you who are gonna leave a comment saying I should get LTE or B Wireless or whatever, those services might be great where you are, but not where I am. I’ve had B Wireless for the past 7 years but you need a direct line of sight to their tower for it to work properly. A few months ago I lost what little line of sight I had which is why I had to look for a B Wireless alternative. Regular internet services from telecoms also doesn’t work properly where I live. Zain Bolt which can easily hit 60-70Mbps at the office barely gets 12Mbps at my place and spends most of the time hovering at around 5Mbps. So I understand you might have super fast mobile or fiber optics internet at your place, at mine it’s a different story.

Its too soon to tell if the Zain Beam speed will remain consistent, but I’m optimistic since Zain are limiting the amount of Beams they install per area. A friend of mine also told me these antennas can be upgraded in the future to work with 5G, so Zain could potentially end up providing much faster internet than their current two options (20Mbps or 40Mbps). Personally, if the connection continues like this for a the next few days I’m not even going to wait for my one month trial period to finish, I’m going to sign up right away.

The cost of the service is KD25 a month for 20Mbps, and KD40 for 40Mbps. With both options you need to commit to 24 months which is a tough pill to swallow. But with no better option, I’m willing to commit. If you guys have any questions about Zain Beam or want me to try anything let me know in the comments below.

59 replies on “Zain Beam – First Impression”

I guess the same illogical inflexible penalty of a few hundred KDs or some rather insane value pegged to the entire 24-month’s contract?

Source: personal experience when I wanted to cancel my device contract after 1 year of suffering. They asked me to pay up the ENTIRE cost of the device (KD 300) rather than the remainder of the contract.

Apparently it’s a 180KD cancelation fee after the first 14 days. It’s no fee or cancel if you’re not getting her constant 20 or 40 mb/s per your contract.

I’ve been using Zain 4G for more than 4 years and until now it never fails to provide the speed that it promised whenever I am. Unlike the other 2 telecoms which I’ve been using and still using at the moment (I had an Ooredo as personal number and Viva as wifi hotspot at home), their signal fluctuates and gets worst during peak hours. That’s just my experience since my residence is within highly populated area. Others would have a different view and feel on these matter but I’ll jump on the wagon if 5G for Zain will be widely implemented

mark if you didn’t have this problem of getting a good signal, out of all the possible internet options which one would you recommend?

Zain claims Beam is unlimited on their website but I’ve heard of telecoms throttling internet after a certain data limit.

Lol. That is clearly a type of MIMO Omnidirectional Antenna for 4G LTE. I’ve had one installed for years now and it only costs around 30-40KD. Installing one yourself shouldn’t limit your speeds as it will always give you the best results it can gain from the outside. If Zain is offering a choice of speeds, then they are doing something on their end to detect their devices and give them certain priorities/limiters, which imo is shady as hell.

One of its limits is it needs to be placed in a spot that provides the best signal, just as you described in your post as you were about to give up. I thought of a way Zain could detect their devices and provide the service they are providing with Beam just after I made my firs comment. Their antenna could be set to operate within certain frequencies while the towers will use those frequencies to separate you from other users on the same network.

Let me be clear on one thing. This works for you so I’m not here to recommend another alternative or talk about other routers (which is stupid really since the router is dependent on the signal it receives from outside and how clogged that signal is, and it sounds like your place isn’t ideal for that tech). I’m only making observations and, I admit, guess work on what Beam is. Cell towers are known to be programmed to automatically limit speeds for users who use them heavily since doing it on a case by case basis is difficult and time consuming. This is done to ensure everyone is getting a fair experience. In some countries, their mobile routers firmware’s allow the user to choose the frequency they want to hop on in case the one they were on was slow. That gives the user freedom to use whatever they feel like. That presents its own problems which I’ll leave for another time.

That makes sense. They’ve basically created another “exclusive” network of a sort with higher speed internet, less congestion and charge a premium for it.

Yes, minus the higher speed internet. Their towers support over 600Mb/s down in perfect conditions. To accommodate more subscribers, they settled with 20/40. I think it’s shady since technically, they didn’t have to add anything to their cell towers other than a little programming to “create” this network and oversell an antenna to their users, if my logic of its mechanism applies.

5G is supposed to fix these issues and this feels like they’re milking the cow while they can. Theoretically, a 5G network with the current congestion rate should still outperform a 4G network by multitudes. For example, let’s say they start 5G at 1.0Gbit/s and with congestion, the end user gets 10% of that, that’s still 100.0Mbit/s. Keep in mind, Zain already achieved over 70Gbit/s with 5G a year and a half ago. Any sane person would criticize these practices.

https://news.kuwaittimes.net/website/zain-kuwait-records-70gbps-speed-5g-trial/

If they’re still on schedule, 5G will be deployed this year. If you remember back in April of last year till October-November, the network was extremely slow and it moved from one area to the next. That was presumably them installing the new hardware to get ready for it. I have no idea why they deployed beam other than milking it.

I happened to pass by the Zain outlet at Salam Mall, Salmiya to check on getting the Beam subscription. I was surprised to get the answer from him that it is only available for Kuwaitis. Im not sure if Zain has started doing this since they plan on having limited Beam connections, but atleast this was what was told to me there.

Zain guys came and could not find any signal..tried for 40 minutes but no luck.. I am stuck here now with 4g which is slower than 2g

Same with me. They couldn’t find a signal. I suggested them to try at the rooftop but said there won’t be a signal there as the building is too high. 🙁

Funny to hear discussions of 30Mbps…we are here complaining that 250Mbps isn’t fast enough and we need to upgrade to 1 Gbps…

Hi Mark. Long back when you posted about B-Wireless( WMD) I immediately subscribe to it and am still continuing with it, lately its been really slow sometimes. Only hurdle with Zain Beam is 2 years subscription.

Agree, I will go for it after your next review insha ALLAH. Also I still have 6 months left for my current subscription.

Confused!

If B is a challenge to get line-of-sight, then why Zain beam had to find good spot on your building roof as being surrounded by taller buildings!

It sounds like Zain beam requires line-of-sight too, isn’t that the case?

I’ve been with them since they started. They are the best stable internet option if you don’t have fiber.
Constant download and upload speed. And their prices are reasonable for the service they offer compared to 4G internet.

I have taken 10 MBPS plan from B wireless. Can I stream 4K videos with this speed or should I upgrade.. I will be using IPTV box.

True, but shouldn’t increase the signal? I did that with mada 5-6 years ago. Speed went from 1-2 mb to a constant 10 mb.

Well the same thing happened with Bolt when they released it, they promised Up to 100 MB, in Jabriya I get 700Kb/sec not even 1 MB in peak time!!! When I called them I heard every available excuse in the universe. Now they are saying up to 20 or up to 40!
To come back to your test, your ping is 192ms, in the gaming world, this is a killer and enough reason to flag it as bad.
It confirms that there is no improvement on the latency, the ping will be the same, if not worse in your uploaded picture as we are getting 100 to 120 ms on landlines. The thing is that the data has to travel the same distance to the EU servers and there is no development there, the lowest Kuwait can reach EU for something like league is in the 70-80s, right now consumers get 100-120 on average. in EU they get 20 to 35ms 🙁
The 192ms in your picture is enough proof that this is way below average and not something for Gamers at least!
Not sure if it is good for 4k streaming by Netflix, but again and for that price… my regular 4G connection on Zain is doing the job fine!
But given the history, experience and promises we had in the past, sadly I’ll pass on the offer!

The issue with Zain Bolt is it depends where you are. Zain Bolt at the office easily gets 60-70Mbps, at my place it drops to like 4-5Mbps. So you getting 700kb/1MB sounds about right, as in we both live in areas where Zain Bolt is pretty crap.

Hello Mark,

i want to know your feedback about Zain Beam after 1 month

and the speed of Download and Upload

and ping

Any new updates on Zain Beam with you? Im in Salmiya block 11. And im hesitate to subscribe with Kems internet or Zain Beam. As I used to have Kems before in my family house since years and still working fine.

I sign for 40mb with zain beam, but hardly getting 7mb, been calling support since day one from the installed, now for the past 18 days or so, still nothing, I ask for cancellation 3 times, but no reply back from them, only filling report and that it.

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