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Zain 5G Final Impression – I Want!

Around a month ago Zain sent over a 5G router for me to test out at home. I’ve already posted a first and second impression post and now after trying out the device for a full month, I’m convinced it’s a must-have connection. There isn’t anything faster right now on the market, not even close.

Clearly 5G is super fast but there are two important questions that need to be answered here:

1) Do you really need 5G speeds?

No, I don’t think so, I don’t think the majority of people need 5G speeds, I personally don’t. Someone left a comment the other day under my iPhone 11 Pro post saying it sucks that the new iPhone doesn’t have 5G, and I have to ask, why would you need 5G speeds on your phone? On my home computers, I rarely download torrents anymore which is where I can see speeds of 500 or 700Mbps making the biggest difference and maybe for downloading a new videogame on my PS4 every now and then or a software update but that’s really it. For normal use 100Mbps would be more than enough. The reason I see the need for 5G is because not everyone can get a fiber connection at home and rarely anyone gets decent LTE speeds at home, so 5G is really the only other option.

When I tried downloading a torrent file over 5G, I hit speeds of around 10MB/s and I ended up downloading a 5GB file in around 7 minutes. 5G is so fast that it might have taken me longer to copy a 5GB file off my home server to my Mac. There is a wow factor when downloading large apps or PS4 updates and you see the progress bar fill up so quickly. 5G is so fast its stupid funny, and in my case where just until a few months ago the fastest connection I could get at home was 10Mbps, jumping up to 700Mbps is a HUGE difference.

So no, I don’t think anyone really needs full 5G speeds for normal use, but for the majority of people, 5G is the only way to crack the 100Mbps barrier at home.

2) Is it expensive?

I know a lot of people might disagree with me here but I don’t think 5G is expensive. If you compare 5G to fiber prices or how much I’m paying for Zain Beam, you’ll quickly realize the amount you’re paying for the speed you’re getting is actually great deal. Here is a quick comparison:

Zain Beam 20Mbps: KD25/m (unlimited bandwidth)
Fasttelco Fiber 50Mbps: KD35/m (unlimited bandwidth)
Qualitynet Fiber 100Mbps: KD32/m (unlimited bandwidth)
Zain 5G (500Mbps+): KD45/m (1TB bandwidth)

I think what really makes 5G seem expensive is the limited bandwidth. Optimally the minimum you would want is 1TB per month. I just checked my usage and from September 12 up to September 30, I consumed around 320GB of bandwidth which is a lot less than I was expecting so 1TB would work out just fine for my needs. If you download tons of PS4 or Xbox games, you’ll probably want more than 1TB and the next step up is a whopping KD65 for 1.8TB.

In conclusion, I want 5G at home even though I just signed up to Zain Beam a few months back. I did ask a Zain employee if I could “upgrade” from Beam to 5G and was told I could without any penalties so that’s good news. I am worried that once 5G becomes a lot more common the speeds would drop, but even if it drops to say 300Mbps I’d still be happy with it. If you haven’t checked out my previous posts on 5G here are the links:

First Impression: Zain 5G in Salmiya
Second Impression: Zain 5G in Salmiya

Also, here is the link to the Zain 5G website.

update: I was just informed that you can’t upgrade from Zain Beam to 5G so I updated my post to reflect that.

62 replies on “Zain 5G Final Impression – I Want!”

They started offering 1 year commitments, the portable router is coming out in about a month (shipment arrived to storage last week or so),and the prices are getting slashed. I say to everyone wait a month before you sign anything. If you were lucky enough, they would have called you already with an offer of +50% off of their bundles.

*They refers to every telecom company.

Yes. 500GB is 17.5KD at the moment from Viva and Ooredoo (almost 10KD cheaper than their lowest bundle, and there no fees for the router added to the bill). It was a “1 day offer” that is still going. The call I got was 19KD, 2 year contract for 1TB (not gonna mention the company). People have been getting calls with these crazy offers for the past month. Try calling them and ask for the marketing and offers department and see if they will give you an actual offer, meaning less than the current prices.

In any case, I say wait. It’s almost New Year’s so why rush in. The portable device announcement might be delayed but, the plan was always October.

Zain just launched their 5G service in KSA. Free Router, Unlimited data, 2 Year contract for 30KWD. So expect the price cuts to come here real soon. Their other option is STC (Viva) that launched a month or 2 ago with the same bullshit prices in Kuwait. I’m looking forward to the changes coming.

Just for reference, how would you describe your internet usage? How much do you stream, download? I agree the biggest issue is the bandwidth limit (btw, does it simply stop when the bandwidth is reach or gets throttled?) Another factor is that i believe you live alone, so there is also that to consider in terms or how much bandwidth is consumed.

So as soon as i get home around 4PM I start streaming tv till around midnight. Mostly Netflix (which is 4K) and then a combination of Philo, YouTube, Amazon etc..

I’m always updating apps on my phone, and just the other day consumed at least 60GB downloading everything to my new iPhone 11. I don’t download lots of video game, I download movie torrents maybe once a week. I do live alone and when a friend does come over they barely use much of my bandwidth.

Not sure what happens after you consume the full 1TB but I’d guess the speed just drops down and doesn’t shut off.

5G does not optimise your 4K streaming experience? Id imagine you get jitter or lags on your zain beam or lesser because if Im not mistaken a 4K movie is about 40-45 GB?

Netflix says you need 25Mbps for 4K so no jitter or lags using 5G. Even with my Beam it works but once i start doing something else while watching 4K I would imagine it drops down to HD.

U can get it for literally 15kwd now.(1tb)
And u must get a entertainment device.(additional payment required, so the cheapest entertainment device is google home mini which is only 750 fils.)

So in total 15.75kd for 2 years contract and 1TB every month

Kuwait has always been ahead in mobile network pricing even with 4g. Anything but to do the hard thing and improve the infrastructure and fiber optic.

Hi Mark,

I heard that 5G will work only upto 6 floors, if you are staying above 6 floors it wont work, is that true?

Well, unfortunately, Zain don’t have 5G in Farwaniya (as per Zain farwaniya branch)

I have 20 Mbps Bwireless internet, still Netflix plays most of the time in SD 🙁

STC totally refused to sell me the 5G router because i live in the 8 floor. even after i told them i will not make any issue for them if it didn’t work I already wanted a CAT 19 router to work as a new 4G+ vs my old CAT 11 4G.

ZAIN said the same + they said I have to pay 3 months in advance. But that was not the issue. ZAIN CS said the same thing. Don’t get it sir. It won’t work in your house.

Both CS agents said that their respective companies are very strict in regards to this policy of not giving the router to ppl living in 6 floors and above.

That is so stupid, as in the USA the 5G signal can reach almost to 20 floors. But in Kuwait they got cheap / low floors 5G towers and i HAVE NO IDEA why!!?? More than half of Kuwait is in tall residential buildings with average of 8-10 floors.

No idea, my office is on the 11th floor and 5G works there. My apartment is like 6th-7th floor (I live on top of a mall) and 5G works perfect for me here.

Since I installed Zain Beam I’ve been getting a consistent 30Mbps and it has been extremely stable, never had to restart the router… like ever.

I personally have terrible reception for Zain inside my house for some odd reason, as soon as I step out, the signal is much better. Thats why I could never use Zain’s internet at home.

Would that effect my network speeds if I get 5G? Or will an antenna be installed in the roof and connected to the router just like B Wireless (my current ISP) for better receptipn?

I wasn’t aware of any BBSes in those days, though Gulfnet had something called “ODS” which I think was essentially a BBS. But it disappeared once the Internet link was in place.

There were some interesting stories but nothing that I could post online 🙂

https://248am.com/mark/internet/bulletin-board-system/

I don’t recall there being gulfnet back then but I remember kems. My parents got me a dial up connection for a month and then I think I telneted into the connection and did a cd.. and then a dir and got a list of folders. Each folder was a username of an account. So printed the list and then one by one tried logging in using same password as the username and the ones that worked I underlined. I then started selling internet connections at my school. I remember that fm 99.7 had their username as fm997 and their password was superstation which was easy to figure out. Bought so many CDs back then with the money I made 😅

Hi mark , sorry to bother u ,just checking how you still feel about 5g at Home?
I’m thinking of signing up this month , and I also live in salmiya block 9, so wanted to check if ur still happy with service and what speeds ur getting ?
Cuz my 4g is completely rubbish
Thanks

Ah yes, I remember KEMS’ systems being notoriously insecure. There was no one there who understood security, so their smarter customers (and even non-customers) had control of the servers, routers, email, everything.

“ When I tried downloading a torrent file over 5G, I hit speeds of around 10MB/s and I ended up downloading a 5GB file in around 7 minutes”

Are you sure about that? Lol I know it’s a typo

10.78MB/s? For downloading? At that price? Why so slow when your internet is so fast? And I need to know good torrent sites – could never do that in the UK (I know you can’t say) 🙂

At 5g speeds other people/servers are the bottleneck. I know Playstation servers are incredibly spotty for example, and never download at my actual speed

5g torrent down speed peaks at 75 MB/s here in Salmiya. It’s fast! Except for the last 24 hours, 5g is down, and it’s really hurting.

So,if anyone is still reading this a quick question if I may.

Zain have just got back to me and released me from my contract with no penalty – accepting that the service is unacceptable.

I’m thinking of going 5G with Viva – I have my iPhone 11 pro with them and regularly get 35Mbps a second in my living room (compared with max of 4 with Zain on a good day).

But I’m not convinced the data limit will be enough. What happens if you go over the data limit? Do they cut it off, or just throttle and if they throttle by how much?

If anyone can answer this I’d be grateful.

If you go over it drops your speeds down to 4g LTE. I blew through about 500GB the first few days (a couple of months ago), but haven’t gone over the 1TB limit

They’ll throttle to 25Kbps (Twenty Five, not a typo). It will take 8 minutes to load a Google search. The speed test will show you normal speeds since they never throttle those sites to dupe customers. Also, it seems that they started throttling download sharing sites (uploaded, rapidshare etc.) but not torrents, for now. Actually, almost everything is throttled to around 350Mbps in actual usage, despite the speed tests giving you 700 and up. Anyone with the ridiculous argument that “your hardware is the bottleneck” should know better. If a speed test gives you over 700, then your hardware sure as hell is capable of that speed since it is writing the test file (Downloading) to your HDD/SDD at that moment. As my previous comment recommends, wait at least till November before you buy anything.

I digressed a bit there but I should mention something regarding your concern and some other ridiculous arguments. Many will say, “oh but 1TB is more than enough. You will never use it all.” Again, they should know better. Assuming you have the right devices, if you constantly stream on your 4K TV app, or any service that offers 4K or High Bit Rate videos, it used to be with a slow connection, you’d rarely get the Max quality of the stream. Whereas now, it’s always at Max and eating at your data plan like crazy. So, you couple that with your downloads, websites that have embedded video players in them that play automatically, or even video chat, and there goes your data.

I hope this has been informative for you.

I have Zain 5G in Mahboula which I mostly use for gaming and streaming some gameplay to Twitch, downloaded The Outer Worlds and Boarderlands 3 in less than 20 minutes, was hitting a download speed of 630Mbps and 70Mbps upload, very happy with it at the moment, Zain phoned me and gave me an 50% discount, 17.5 KWD for 600GB per month, use to pay 12 KWD for 1TB of 4G

I’m trying to get the same 17.5kd deal but according to the person i spoke to i’m not a loyal customer… even though i’ve been a customer since 1995. So not really sure what calculation they’re going by.

Oh, that’s a bit unfortunate, I was not going to switch to 5G at all and was happy with 4G, but then I received the call from Zain, I have a feeling that it might get slower the more users switch to 5G tho, I could be wrong, but if I get 60 plus download and anything 20 plus upload, I will still be very happy with it

Kind of silly that I reply to my own comment. But maybe someone will read this. I manage to download a few games with a total of 90 GB in less than 20 minutes, I also manage to stream to Twitch with 0.5% dropped frames for a 2 hour stream. Streaming at 720p 30FPS (will be testing 60FPS later on). I get around 88 – 103 ping to Europe servers while playing Rainbow Six Siege or Apex Legends. Downloaded Borderlands 2 last night and it took around 4 minutes to complete it for a 9.5GB download. With my 4G on Zain, I had a 1TB data package, now I have 600GB 5G package but I could never even finish 300GB in total. 600GB for me personally is more than enough

Any time before the new year. BTW, people who had subscribed to the lowest plan, 250/260GB for 25/26KD, have all been upgraded to new and the yet-to-be announced 1TB plan. People who had the old 1TB are now enjoying 4TB. Things are changing fast since the start of the month.

Viva and Zain started offering 5G bundles that are essentially 4x the data capacity for the same price of the old. I have no idea why they aren’t advertising it since it went into effect on Nov. 7th and the mandate has been given to every call center representative. Call them and ask them about it and they’ll get you signed up within a day.

Example, 1TB is currently 45KD at Viva & Zain, with the new plans, you get 4TB. So, the 500GBx4 = 2TB for 35KD which should satisfy most people. I honestly can’t recommend anyone to get lower than 2TB when it comes to 5G. Good luck everyone.

1TB is 25KD at Viva and 26KD at Zain, if anyone cares.

You’re welcome. I’ve already posted about Ooredoo’s plans right above your previous comment. Since you are waiting for the Mobile router, wait 1 more moth.

Note: In regards to VIVA’s new plans, you can find them on their website now and they’re what I posted previously. If you speak to their call center employees or online chat, they will all describe the offer as on their website. However, when you put the request to subscribe and get a phone call the following day from the Sales&Offers department, they will tell you that that list is a mistake. And if you pay close attention to what’s written on the website, you’ll notice something wrong as well.

In any case, I did find the “correct” pricing to be kinda better. The website lists the 1TB for 25KD on a 12months contract. It’s actually 17.5KD. The 2TB is listed as 35KD with a 12 months contract. That doesn’t exist. It’s 25KD with a 24months contract. It’s kinda good and bad. The bad is that you can’t get a 12 months only contract with it. The good is, it’s relatively cheap and almost excellent for any type of usage.

As for the rest, the prices are the same if I’m not mistaken. ALL OF THESE OFFERS COME WITH THE ROUTER “FREE” ONLY. ANY EXTRA DEVICES WILL HAVE AN AMOUNT ADDED TO YOUR MONTHLY BILL. CANCELLATION FEES ARE 156KD WITHOUT EXTRA DEVICES (PS4,XBOX,IPADS).

Zain 5G @ 15 kd with unlimited usage and free router.
Hi all, has the second wave of price slashes started among the service providers! How’s it with the other two. Seems a good time to jump on the 5G wave.

I signed up with Zain for 17.5 KD 500GB with the Bolt router 2 weeks ago. Straight out of the box it was giving 400-500 Mb/s on speedtest and fast.com and I was very relieved as I live in a fairly tall building. Days pass and the speeds were dropping to the 100’s which was still awesome for me. But now it’s really struggling and very inconsistent, fluctuating from 20s down to nothing. And to add insult to injury now they have this 15KD unlimited deal. My exit penalty is 195 KD so think really hard before committing to any plans.

juswt got the STC 8kd per month 1tb 5g with small biscuit type router.

Constant 380mbdownload on speedtest.

Torrents not going well.

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