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Back online

Posted on February 5, 2008
Filed Under DSL, Internet | Leave a Comment

Yay! I’m back, after ten years!

Last week, there was an internet outage in Middle East and south asian countries due to a damaged cables lying under the seabed. It happened Wednesday that’s why the casualty, at first, has not noticed by home users. But businesses and call centers are much affected because of they rely on this technology. Until now, they are not sure what caused the damage and when is the internet going to be stable.

Our internet connection here in the building is not quite stable yet. Time to time I got disconnected and wait for hours to re-establish a connection. I tried to download Visual c++ 2008 express edition to test the download speed of our connection and to my surprise I downloaded it fast and encountered only one problem, that’s when I got disconnected.

Internet connectivity has been a part of each of our lives and we feel incomplete when we are not able to check our mails and do our daily tasks with the internet. It’s just frustrating trying to go online these past few days.

How’s Broadband Status here in Riyadh?

Posted on January 2, 2008
Filed Under Broadband, DSL, Internet, Riyadh | Leave a Comment

Five years ago, Internet here in Saudi Arabia is much more like the others. Still, dial up through 56k modem is the main gateway through the internet. Prepaid cards then were sold for 20 Riyals for 20 hours. I think we also pay for additional charges through our telephone bill.

Three months ago, I came back here in Riyadh and was surprised that there are already a lot of broadband users. Yes, I saw them because they are connected through WIFI. But then ISPs rate are expensive excluding the devices. And down speed is slow compared to my connection, myDestiny, in the Philippines. I am not connected directly to the modem because I am using wifi but still I experience slow connectivity and intermittent connection. The access point is in the room above our flat.

I am still trying to convince my father to get us a broadband connection. In that way, I can test whether broadband here in Riyadh is really slow. Anyways, thanks to our neighbors for their wireless connection.

By the way, Another thing that I noticed is that their wireless connections are not secured. And if it’s secured, most of them are using WEP encryption which is more vulnerable to hackers.

The good: Lots of unsecured wireless connection, free wifi, a very kind neighbor.(grins)

The bad: Expensive subscription, down and up speed, lots of blocked sites.