Internet Blackout

From Wednesday 4th July to Friday 6th July Lebanon witnessed an internet blackout on national scale.
This was due mainly to a cut on the submarine cable IMEWE near Egypt that mainly affected all the country that take from the IMEWE but not as much as Lebanon.
Why will you ask? Because Lebanon's internet capacity is 21Gbps, 19Gbps from the IMEWE cable!
Cyprus gently granted us 10Gbps for free for 2 weeks. (Minister of Telecom)

Now back on how the end users were affected, on wednesday from 4pm til 10-11pm ALL the ISP's were out. There was not a single data circulating! When the internet came back, it was slower that dial up... not a single page was opening normally. Google took 3 minutes to open.
On Thursday, the internet was partially back but was very slow. On Friday same thing (I had to use my 3G connection); but on Friday night (when cyprus gave us these 10Gbps) the internet came back to normal.

And finally I would like to thank the Minister for all his effort to get back the Internet to Lebanon!

That's it for today, I'll update you when something new come out!
Stay Tuned and don't forget to subscribe

Alfa U-Chat

The minister said that he would announce officially new prices for mobile services, but he did not say a single word about them since he announced the decrease of the BlackBerry service price. Instead we witnessed a new service by Alfa Telecom which is as follow:

 -U-chat 17$:  200 SMS and 250 MB of mobile data and 60mins of calls

 -U-Chat 9$: 200SMS, 50MB of mobile data and 30mins of call

And in week end you are free to call one Alfa number (unlimited)

Out of Plan usage are billed for both services as follow: Local Call 0.6$/min; Local SMS 0.04$/SMS and 0.2$/MB

Note: Uchat clients are not allowed to benefit from the following services WAP, Pay as you go, friends and family, sunday promotion, "Ehkineh". 

These are the official plan. Now what they Don't tell you: The unlimited call during the week end are limited to 60 minutes (meaning that your call will drop every 60minutes) and you can only change Once per month

Some are even saying that the unlimited offer is limited to only 60 minutes to ALL the week ends (Need confirmation, this info is not 100% sure) 

A little comparison between the 3 prepaid offers that we have:
Normal Prepaid: 0.36$/min Call, 0.09$/SMS with a possibility to recharge whenever you want, the worst offer
Alfa Waffer Plan: This plan is special because it depends on the card you are buying 
  -9.09$ Card: 0.3$/min Call, 0.07$/SMS
  -15.15$ Card: 0.25$/min Call, 0.07$/SMS
  -27.27$ Card: 0.23$/min Call, 0.07$/SMS
Note that you can benefit from all the services except "Ehkineh", BUT you cannot recharge whenever you want, you have to wait for the end of the month. There is a 4$ Emergency Card where the call is billed 0.4$/min. If you are subscribed to the Friends & Family service and you made a call during off peak hours, the higher discounted rate is applied. (peak hour are quite useless, you are never calling someone at 10pm)
And also you cannot send $ to another number
And finally we have the Alfa U-Chat plan as stated above.
Concerning my opinion I find the best plan to be Alfa Waffer 27.27$, you can call for lower prices, and 27.27$ ought to be enough for a normal user like me. 
For the call lovers I suggest the postpaid plan or the U-Chat 17.5$ plan.






Stay tuned for it's MTC counterpart