Kuwait internet caps, who’s to blame?

To join the internet caps bandwagon and because it pisses me off seeing some people making up baseless theories, I decided to write this post. And I hope someone corrects me if I’m wrong at any point.

I’ll spit out what I heard\read around in short:
* MoC is responsible for the download cap and they applied the rule to the other ISPs
* Why don’t ISPs in Kuwait upgrades their servers to handle the load? This sucks!
* It’s a deal that ISPS have came up with together against their consumers!
* All ISPs are buying bandwidth from MoC!
* Loolykinns lieks mudkipz!!

Well, first, I’d like to let everyone that I LUUUUUURVE MUDKIPZ xD

No really, here goes what I know:

As an ex-FASTtelco employee with good strings still attached, I know how to get infos. Calling call centers won’t help because no matter how you stress a conversation, you’re only going to hear what their superiors told the HD guys to say. If you want to get real stuff, talk to them outside their work domain.

And everyone knows the retarded scenarios I’ve been with VIVA (Waiting to spend what I paid for then I’m canceling my subscription.. UP YOURS VIVA!!), so I’ll try to be as fair as possible.

To start with, I’d like to exclude Wataniya, Zain and VIVA because they’re all sub-ISPs if its right to call them that because their providers are KEMS, QNet, FASTtelco and GulfNet. so I’ll be taking those for.

I’m not going to explain how users abuses their traffic… I mean, I’m not gonna explain how resident accounts are used to share a single internet connection for a flat (Where it should’ve been a corporate, not resident) or those who subscribe for RapidShare and their likes and max Kuwait’s global bandwidth (Yes, not torrent, RapidShare… Can you believe that?).

What I’m going to explain is trying is how not to involve MoC (Ministry of Communication) in this bullshit.

Due to high bandwidth consumption by residents here in Kuwait (We don’t have RIAA or MPAA to stop us, Muahahahaha), our ISPs bandwidths gets maxed every now’n’then which at the end cause slow internet traffic for the end user. So it’s only fair to raise the provided traffic, right?
So they did what a sane person would do; buy more bandwidth for customers. But the prices are crazily higher than before. For example (Not real numbers, just fake numbers to give a good image of my example), If the current traffic for an ISP is 1Tbps and it’s maxed and it costs 1 million KD a year. To double it, it’ll cost 3 millions not just 2. So they had to apply Fair Access Policy. Wise decision or not, not my argument here.

However, applying that policy differs from one company to another.
Gulfnet and QNet are have a specific quota; x GB per y Period.
KEMS and FASTtelco are playing it the “Abusers gets capped, clean ones gets clean” sort of policy where you’d get capped if you abused the internet to an extreme level (Not sure about KEMS, but I’m sure that this policy is applied to FASTtelco).

Now, if MoC was involved in this incident, wouldn’t ISPs have a single policy? If MADA (The company that just started providing WiMAX to residents [People things it’s new, it’s not. It’s just new to the residents market]), wouldn’t they be enforced to apply such rule? MADA is offering unlimited bandwidth for 3 months subscription *cough*I just subscribed*cough* to test waters and then they’ll decide whether they’ll limit it or not. And if they did, what will the limit be?

MoC is not really involved. Yes, ISPs rent the fiber-cable, not the bandwidth neither service from MoC. Long story short, FAP have been applied because the demand is high and the providers won’t rent more\better service. Who’s to blame? User? ISP? That’s for you to pull up but not MoC. As much as I hate MoC and how stupid and fucked up they can be (And how they usually fuck improvements and developments here in Kuwait), they’re not to blame this time… Only this time 😛

Who’s to blame really? Blame both ISPs and consumers; ISPs for not finding a fundamental solution yet (AKA not being cheap and rent more bandwidth) and consumers for changing their purpose of existence in this life from whatever they used to believe in to “Download porn and pirated contents to the last drop!”. Your abuse backfired at us all, and ISPs are just too cheap to upgrade (And if they raised the price a bit, we bitch about it *cough*INFOCONNECT*cough*).

I’d also like to note that it’s mentioned in the contract that “ISP is to change contract without referring to customer”… or something like that… I know because I fell for it, Fuck you VIVA!

How do I know that MoC is not involved? I have confirmed from guys I know who works in both QNet and FASTtelco regarding MoC’s involvement and they both denied it. That, and there’s something called “common sense” that we forgot about apparently and started to jump into conclusions and believe baseless rumors.

So, there you have it. If you have any solid-based rumor or anything please share it with us. It’ll be up to us whether to believe it or not. This goes to this post too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy with whats going on and I’d join any petition or a well-behaved and smart protest, I’m just pointing out some stuff that the majority don’t know about.

9 thoughts on “Kuwait internet caps, who’s to blame?

  1. If europe and us residents get double (triple?) the rate we get here for a fraction of what we pay here, who’s fault is it?

    My main issues with ISPs here are:
    A. They didn’t honer our agreement: come on, do you really think adding “we can change our service anyway we like” clause to the agreement is fair? (or legally correct for that matter)
    B. Fair use policy isn’t fair: 2GB for our household is silly.
    C. False advertisement: they should have advertised there service as “512K/s with an limited 2M/b boost” and not as “2M/b”
    D. fixed pricing and behind-the-scene deals (remember last infoconnect?)
    E. The continues lies/ignorance from customer support: ether put on someone who can tell me what’s really going on or shut down the help center. your call.

    1. If europe and us residents get double (triple?) the rate we get here for a fraction of what we pay here, who’s fault is it?

      We get much cheaper gas and fuel than they does. Internet juts costs more here than there.

      B. Fair use policy isn’t fair: 2GB for our household is silly.

      It is, but then again, there are other companies with different policies (Or A company with a different policy)

  2. Have to disagree with you on the point of torrent, porn and rapidshare. I am not one of them but there are plenty of users out there who download from Steam and other services, legitimate and legal content and i dont have to tell you the size of games.

    Also there are people like me just downloading patches of legitimate games. 600 mb and even more.

    Anyway, i need to look into more details as i don’t know how long haul network cables are connecting Kuwait to the world, but if Kuwait has more, may be the problem can be solved. A country like Kuwait can definitely afford it.

    1. The keyword here is illegal downloads.

      As in, those who downloads pirated material like breathing air.

  3. Just called Kems and they have a limit to how much you can dl per day. For example 2mb limit is around 2.9gb per day. Their policy is NOT based on “We will cap only the abusers.”

  4. I disagree when you say that the user is also at fault for his uncontrollable ‘needs’. The ISP must always be ready to provide bandwidth whenever there is a need for more. What a user downloads and how much he downloads is not the business of the ISPs because the user fulfills his part of the deal by paying his dues.

    Take India for example. It’s got a population of more than 1 BILLION. Yes it may be an emerging economy and there may not be a large proportion of the population who have access to high speed internet, but we can rest be assured that number may have taken over the entire population of Kuwait by now. Regardless of the population, the ISPs in India deliver what the user demands. They dont care whether he downloads Terabytes worth of porn and pirated movies, games etc. If he pays his bill, his right to internet is ensured.

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