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WiMD Internet – 3 Months Later

Back in February I signed up to a 10Mbps connection with WiMD and just over 3 months have passed since then so I figured I’d post a second impression. For those of you who missed my previous posts, WiMD is a local wireless internet provider that uses technology similar to WiFi and WiMAX except theirs works using the 5 GHz wavelength.

Since installing WiMD I got rid of all my other internet connections and have put all my trust in them. That might not sound like a big deal but you have to consider the fact I live my life online and if I don’t have access to internet I start experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Ok maybe that’s a bit extreme but you get the idea.

So how’s the connection speed 3 months later? Browsing websites everything is still super fast, pages load instantly and there is no lag of any sort. Downloading torrents I also don’t have any issues, if I let it download without any limitations it can easily bypass 1,000Kbps. YouTube on the other hand is horrible with WiMD. I’m not sure what exactly is the problem but I can stream an HD video from Vimeo instantly but I can’t watch a non-HD video on YouTube without having to wait ages for it to load. Running speed tests has also provided me with vastly different results than when I first started with WiMD. When I last ran the speed tests 3 months back I was getting results of around 10Mb/s, this time around I was having trouble getting half that. Check out the results below:

But really if it wasn’t for the YouTube issue I wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. My biggest issue really is the YouTube problem since it’s ridiculous to have to wait for a low res video to load on a 10Mbps connection. I’ve already contacted support and they told me they’re working on a fix for it and I trust that they are. The speed test results have dropped considerably and what gets affected by this the most is downloads from a single source like say downloading an update or video from an Apple server. Since most of my downloads take place while I’m out of the house or asleep I’m not affected by this but I’m sure it does other people.

The best thing about WiMD and something I make great use of is the upload speed, it’s fast! What this allows me to do is upload files onto the server a lot quicker compared to my previous DSL connection. Nat takes advantage of this the most since she spends a lot of time emailing her clients large files and what used to take her a couple of hours now takes around 20 minutes.

But, like I previously mentioned, I’ve given up all my other internet connections including my very reliable DSL connection because I trust WiMD. I know they’re busy right now working to fix whatever needs to be fixing so I’m not concerned too much. They’ve just started catering to consumers recently and I know for a fact they’ve been overwhelmed with subscribers so it’s only a matter of time before things get back to normal. I’ll have to wait and see but so far I have no regrets signing up with them. They’re the best available option for me right now.

If you’re interested in a connection you can call them on 22475841 and 22475842 or visit their website [Here]

Update: Turns out the problem was the connection from my house to the tower. It’s been fixed and new speedtest results are posted [Here]

69 replies on “WiMD Internet – 3 Months Later”

I hope thats the case Mark I really do. I want to take full advantage of my new connection. Thank you for posting your updated impressions.

Sounds incredible, will definitely switch to them sometime in the future. Because even with the best fiber connection, you can’t get such high upload speed in Kuwait.

Oh and btw MOC announced today a new ruling to allow any of the communication companies (other than the four main ISPs) to buy internet bandwidth directly from MOC!

This should cut the costs down for companies like WiMD and other mobile companies, since they used to get their internet form ISPs such as Kems at higher prices than directly from MOC.

Are you using Safari for browsing? I have a lot of trouble with Youtube in Safari but not with other browsers.

حقيقه المفترض انها تكون ثابته السرعه توالناس على تنزيل السرعه وخصوصا انهم يستقبلون كاش عموما اتمنى انهم يردون على وضعهم كما كنت بالاول شكرا لطرحك التجربه

I think you are being too optimistic Mark. These aren’t teething problems due to the service being new. As in the case of Viva and Mada, the service starts off good, then goes to hell as more customers subscribe. They don’t upgrade their infrastructure accordingly (because of the excessive cost for a new cash flow negative company). I believe that you experienced WIMD’s best days, and its all downhill from there. Although it seems the downhill is less steep with WIMD than with Mada, because with Mada there was no installation process causing a backlog.

I don’t think I’m being too optimistic. WiMD isn’t competing with viva or Mada, they’re competing with DSL providers and they believe they’re a better option. They’re selling themselves as a “premium internet provider” and that’s why I believe unlike other providers they do want whats best for their customers.

Maybe it’s worthless to you but to me it’s either 10Mbps with WiMD or 2Mbps via DSL and I’m 110% positive I made the right choice. Even if I had an 8Mbps DSL option I would still have gone with WiMD just for the upload speed.

Well you live in Salmiya, i live in South surra, so maybe thats a better choice for you o.o .

Also, what do you mean by “Upload Speed” if you had 8Mb ? I Get constant 9Mb Upload/Download , Thats 1.1 Megabyte persecond Upload & Download.

What was your ISP ?

South Surra actually has good DSL, most of the rest of Kuwait has really shitty DSL and this is a much better option than it. Our area still has less than 2mb connection speeds and lots of them switched to WIMD recently.

Mark you will always get better quality service than a normal subscriber. You are a blogger and your service provider would make sure you are the last one to suffer quality degradation.

Well they dont need divert their bandwidth to a particular tower. For a particular customer, certain configuration is required back in their network and thats it.

Well if thats the case and I’m getting special treatment and super fast internet why am i here posting about the problems I’m having and updated speed test results showing i’m getting half the speed i was getting before?

Hey mark, did you try it on online gaming like on ps3 or xbox360 ? i want to know if its good because im having troubles with qualitynet and my subscribtion ends next month so im looking for something better

Does it make a difference? I’m wondering the same thing and I live in Fintas. Currently using a 2MB Q-net connection.

It’s “okay…”.

According to my brother who shares my connection, online gaming is better with WiMD compared to our previous 2Mbps DSL connection. Lower ping rates plus the higher upload speed are most likely the reasons.

With a bit of clever routing or a more capable router (look into the Buffalo WBMR-HP-G300H with DD-WRT firmware, they have them in hawally) you can run your PS3 or 360 via a VPN service to get lower pings. It isn’t always the most stable but from my tests with it you can get sub 100ms pings to the UK and matchmaking is near instantaneous.

That is something new, all my browsing/gaming/steam and so on is done via VPN, are you sure its not just the router acting up?

I have a wimd 6mbps subscription and since about 1 month ago I’m lucky if I get 3 mbps. Wimd blame it on a connection point in Hawally and that it will take 2 weeks to fix. Come on, in 2012 it shouldn’t take 2 weeks to fix a hardware issue! I’m not getting what I’m paying for and all Wimd can say is sorry. Sorry but NOT good enough for me Wimd!!!!

Mark believe me, once the speedtest.net results go down, they’re not coming back to their previous-faster- condition, I know because I used to get 8MB on Mada when I first I got it.. if I get 2 MB on speetest these days, I’m a happy man 🙁

The YouTube mystery is easy to solve. YouTube has local cache mirrors with QualityNET and KEMS, which is why it is super fast to browse – most – videos.

Also why you see Zain/Viva/Wataniya showing off their connections at malls with YouTube videos.

There is a huge drop of the result comparing of your previous post
Have you asked them about that issue !!!

About YouTube have you tried to clear your History/Cookies ?
Or at least tried another PC just to make sure its not from the
internet service !

One final Q :

Are you planing to renew your subscription with this WiMD ?

I’ve already spoken to them and they have a fix coming soon which I can’t share at the moment. I’ve tried it from a number of computers all give the same result. And yes I would renew since as I’ve mentioned previously they’re the best option for me.

Just as a point of information, it appears windows is in the process of major updates.

As many people have their systems set to auto update, you may find bandwidth being hogged by these updates and a local slow down across all mobile networks. Yesterday, I had 23 updates to my Vista system..

I don’t know man. Sounds like you are trying to convince yourself of something here. You paid for one thing and now it isn’t what it was. But you say it’s “good enough” for now. So how far does it have to degrade before you are really affected?

I also agree with someone else who said that you probably won’t go back to your original speeds. FWIW, I had a 10M connection back home and routinly downloaded at 2.5Mbps. 1Mbps from a 10M connection isn’t all that impressive.

I paid for 10Mbps and I’m downloading at 10Mbps so yeah it’s “good enough” if that’s what you want to call it. I guess for the connection to degrade I would have to be getting less than what I paid for which hasn’t happened yet. The YouTube issue is annoying obviously as I’ve mentioned but they’re working on it so I’m willing to wait.

Just an FYI though, if you were downloading at 2.5Mbps that means you had a 25Mb connection and not a 10Mb.

That’s like saying you have a 100Mb ethernet connection at home but I transfer at speeds of 1Gb. I guess they upgraded your connection.

No, there is no direct ratio like that that I’m aware of. Download speeds can theoretically be equal to your ISP connection speed. They never will because of throttling, bottlenecking, load on the server(s), source of download, ect. You said “I paid for 10Mbps and I’m downloading at 10Mbps so yeah it’s “good enough” if that’s what you want to call it.” You hit 9.5 with a Kuwait server but significantly less than that going long distance. I’d say that is a pretty significant degredation.

That said, your speeds are still pretty good for Kuwait. Also, every ISP promises great connection speeds and reliability but most don’t deliver.

Do you download torrents and if so, what kind of speeds do you see there?

ISPs advertise in megaBITS and downloads are in megaBYTES. A megabyte is 8 megabits. It is physically impossible for a 10Mb connection to download at 2.5 MB, you have to divide by 8 to get your max download speed. 2.5 needs a speed of 18MB.

Either they upgraded your speed or you are misremembering.

Possibly they did and didn’t tell me. Have no idea why they would do that, but I have to admit it is a possibility. However, I had that connection for over 3 years and routinely performed speedchecks and never noticed a difference. Doesn’t matter now anyway since I have upgraded to fiber and have a 50M service.

Its quiet funny that the last time u had written a good review on WIMD’s services, they had someone from their company mention on how good their services were and the so on’s, however now when uve written with an updated review on the issues u are facing you don’t seem to have anyone from WIMD comment on it … reminds me of my fair weathered friends … mE

I have called WiMD to sign up for a 10mbps connection and they told me they have a queue and will get back to me in 5 weeks, they told me the process is they come to my house, check the signal strength and if everything is ok they will install their antenna and I will pay them.

6 weeks later, I called them asking them if they are ever coming, then I get an answer from one of their staff that they have decided to change their policy and now I need to come to them, pay the full amount, and only then they will come to my house and test the service, and if everything is ok then they will proceed otherwise they will refund me the full amount.

Honestly, this is one stupid policy, and one weird way of treating customers as well. I did not expect to wait for 6 weeks only to be told that you have changed your policy now and won’t do what you promised me earlier. Do it to new customers, not to the ones you already have in the queue. Actually, just go back to your old policy, because this new one makes no sense to me.

Reacting to their action, I went online and renewed (and upgraded) my DSL connection with KEMS to 8Mbps even though I hate KEMS customer support. GG WiMD.

When I went and got a sub they told me the reason was they wanted to interact with customers. The old way they would send a guy to the house and get no feedback.

I went to their office yesterday and signed up for the 6 meg service and now I’m reading all this… I met with them, paid 375KD up front and now I’m thinking I made a bad choice. I live in Mangaf, so when/if they install, I’ll report back my findings.

By the way, I circled the place 4 times before finding it. It’s in the same building as The Coffee Bean.

Just for a different point of view I’ve recently started using WiMD and it’s great. Phone lines in the area are shit and it’s so much better than Mada, Zain and Viva. If I had a landline I don’t know if I’d use it but fact is I don’t and this is by far the best option for me.

Good morning. For the benefit of your readers, we decided to address all issues collectively rather than in bits and pieces hence we were waiting for a fair number of comments/feedback to come through this post.

We are facing some routing issues with our upstream providers in terms of best and optimal paths to popular servers. We are working with our partner ISPs in routing us through optimal terrestrial/undersea cables to these popular servers.

Besides, we are also working towards solutions which will optimize the customers’ experience to browse and stream from popular websites at higher speeds.

For your readers and our customers connecting to our Hawally node, we regret any inconvenience that may have been caused. We were prompt to identify the reason for the issues faced which was that our antenna catering the Qurtuba and Surra area was damaged by reasons unknown to us. Besides this, the performance of all our antennas in the Hawally node were jeopardized by another operator installing their high power antennas in front of ours.

Every provider has an allocated antenna space on the MoC radio towers and this operator definitely went against those regulations and installed their equipment in front of our antennas and on our allocated height. Customers started feeling the pinch due to heavy interference from these high gain antennas. We decided to inspect the tower as it never happens that any provider violates the law to such an extent. Having found this situation, we immediately lodged an official complaint with MoC and the case is up for deliberation in the Undersecretary’s office.

Until a decision is announced, we cannot touch our existing antennas or the other party’s equipment. Thankfully, we have been granted alternative space on the tower by MoC and the work around solution has been deployed. We are migrating our affected customers gradually to avoid this issue from occurring again.

We would like to reiterate again that we are committed to delivering the subscribed bandwidth the customer signs up for. The user experience in regards to the issues mentioned above will be resolved as soon as possible.

Customers have put faith in a wireless provider against traditional wired operators and we will continue to deliver what we promised.

Hi,

I have sent an email to your info mailbox asking to get contacted as iwas interested in getting a connection around month ago. Nobody has got in touch with means I am very disappointed. I would appreciate a response from you this time around.

Regards,
Mustafa

Hi,

I have sent an email to your info mailbox asking to get contacted as iwas interested in getting a connection around month ago. Nobody has got in touch with means I am very disappointed. I would appreciate a response from you this time around.

Regards,
Mustafa

id really like a wired connection, but unfortunately i max out at 2mbps.

will switch to wimd when my subscription with qnet ends.

Does anyone have any experience with the viva “up to 42.2mb” service? I’d be interested to know how that compares to Wimd (or Mada), apart from being cheaper. They are meant to be bringing out a wifi router service as well as the current USB offering and I’m thinking of signing up (in shaab).

some facts about WIMD.

The company started with an excellent idea to cover the built up area of the state (aprox 500sqm) with MESH-WIFI; ie outdoor wifi. using a WIMAX network for backhaul. two excellent cloud networks providing genuine broadband connectivity in kuwait. look at it as DSL in your pocket with, if not mobile, definitely a nomadic service proposition. Wherever you go you have WIMD service available

instead of this, and for awkward internal political struggles, the company moved to using what mark calls the 5GHZ frequency range.

Customers should know WIMD is building a Point to Point network (every client has his/her pipe) this is how they can guarantee the bandwidth today; no sharing no contention ratios, etc. the problem is that this Point to point topology is very much a spaghetti network, the more customers they connect, the more complicated it becomes, the more costly the maintenance. Cloud vs individual links…..

other issues related to this approach are

* the frequency range used is unlicensed , unregulated and prone to interference. there is a huge amount of 5GHz illegal antennas in kuwait using same technology albeit without MOC approval. one cane easily spot them (square 20x20cm antennas on top of private dwellings, shops etc)

* network very sensitive to a dynamic urban city such as kuwait, with new building arising, potentially cutting previously established point to point links. As you see the technology selected by WIMD is very much a Line of sight technology (receiver and transmitter must see each other or nearly ) unlike Non line of sight technologies, such as WIFI, WIMAX, GSM etc

The funny thing is that the Point to point approach will exponentially increase the cost of bandwidth to WIMD as they cannot capitalise on contention (they loose the statistical foundation of DSL which enables ISPs to build cost-efficient networks). point to point is an excellent approach for last mile connectivity for businesses for example. Much less for a mass market approach.

Think twice before moving to WIMD and don’t get wooed by speed only. A service provider must guarantee you
* availability of the service
* longevity of the service (i anticipate many court cases to come)
* privacy; did anybody bother to see if WIMD encrypts its wireless traffic????? or all you all happy to see your credit card details transmitted in clear through the ether?

I will stop here, but much more to say ……

Hi
I have got the viva up to 42.2 it’s terrible to e honest I’m chaning to Wimd as soon as they offer monthly payment which I tweeted the company on twitter and they said “We will launch monthly payment very soon”
Basically get Wimd its way better than Mada and viva also the connection isn’t shared like viva and other internet companies on landlines or like Mada so you won’t have your internet dropping because too many people are connected to it.
( My friend has the internet of Wimd ) so I suggest choice Wimd

I live in surra and today was the day they should install their gear to provide me with the service but what i got is a very very bad service where the connection to the servers outside of kuwait was very very poor (the speed test of 10 servers outside of kuwait (EUROPE) had a ping from 586 to 1200 and a download speed of 1.48 and upload speed of .65) where it was 4 to 5 mb in kuwait servers.
and my contract was the 6Mbs unlimited 375 KD.
The download speed for the client “Origin” update was 21Kps.
When i played battlefield 3 they kicked me for high ping (german server)
and i am working into getting my full money back from this company.
I DONT RECOMMEND TAKING ANY SERVICE FROM THIS COMPANY.

Its was very fine, now a days the blocked all torrent website. and some time net will b disconnected automaticaly willl b back aftr an half hour.its happend weekly one or two time.

Hi MArk ,

Can you please post your current impression regarding Wi-Md ? .. Iam planning on stopping my horrible Viva 42.2 and switching to a new provider . Any suggestions ? . I need high bandwidth since i have around 7 devices(2 Macs/ipad/iphone/3 laps) and ll be streaming HD videos and Playing Games online .

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