Flickr throttled?

Do you guys (in Bahrain) have a problem connecting normally to Flickr? I can connect no problem through a proxy but straight through just takes ages. Have they (or are they) blocking or at least proxying/throttling that in Bahrain (hence the slowdown) I wonder?

I’m not raising alarms, but just want your feedback, maybe it’s something wrong with my setup for some reason.

The ping test is okay,

— flickr.com ping statistics —
13 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 239.654/243.084/253.132/3.216 ms

I called the inet help desk and they say that everything is functioning okay and that flickr is not blocked.

Can you guys check and let me know?

Thanks.

Comments

  1. Amjad

    I heard, not sure, that flickr in UAE is blocked. Because of the nudity pictures of Emarati girls which are published in flickr..

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  3. goodman

    a lot of websites are slow and flickr is one of them, the best way to solve this is to speak to the inet helpdisk senior directly

  4. Pingback: Global Voices Online » Bahrain: Flickr Problems?

  5. MBC

    The whole Internet service is slow, many websites won’t open unless you waited & waited & waited, or used a proxy.

    :tongue: Wait for a while and when the service becomes worst batelco will claim that they would fix a cable in order to regain their normal bad service!

  6. vagabondblogger

    I was informed by an reader from the Emirates that flickr is indeed blocked, but as for Bahrain, I don’t know. I have had a few problems with flickr on and off myself. They just updated some sort of system (I am “safe” – guessing you are too) hoping to get countries to censor via the “safe”, etc. classification instead of blocking the whole site. On the other hand, I’m a MAC user and even though I love my Mac, i have had problems – particularly with internet type issues. Some systems just are not that compatible. Sigh.

  7. Ali7

    Only Google is not throttled :sleeping: .
    Well, I think it’s a major connectivity issue. So don’t waste your time calling inet helpdesk (when they were helpful anyway? :sick: )

  8. mishmish

    Yep. In UAE right now and flickr is blocked.

    Not that that was Mahmood’s question, but anyway. Coming over from the UK, it’s strange to see blocked sites….

  9. Jay Jerome

    Coming over from the UK, it’s strange to see blocked sites….

    Get used to it… You’re going to see a lot more blocked sites, worldwide. Future generations will look back at these times as the Golden-Age of Information Flow — Your grandchildren will look at you with wondrous eyes, and say: “is it true people were once able to see what they wanted on the internet, grand-daddy?” And you will say: “Shush… they may be listening…”

    example1

    example2

    Example3

    Example4

  10. Ali

    As said by goodman, MBC, and Ali7.. There’re few issues with inet network that cause throttling. The slowness is noticable at certain locations of Bahrain and at certain times of the day (mainly afternoon/early evening).

  11. Pamela

    I know YouTube is blocked in Turkey, but I don’t know about Flickr??

    I’ll ask my sister.

  12. Anonymous

    got a 2Mb line and its slower than dial-up. is it only batelco or all IPS in bahrain?

  13. Sam

    I have 2mb like the person above called batelco talked to some guy told him about it who told me my line was okay i said no it it is not my 56 dial up at work is faster so I told him Akbar haramia he laughed, we are trully lambs to the slaughter in this country they could improve this garbage they call the net but they are to worried about buying boats and houses this will always be a third world hole.

  14. Ash

    Mahmood, I frequently find Flickr is incredibly slow to load (my Flickr site is also my homepage so I notice whenever this happens). Nothing is blocked here (UK) and my broadband connection is very fast but Flickr itself is regularly slow. So the problem could well be Flickr’s hardworking servers rather than any blocking.

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    mahmood

    Thanks all, I agree with Ash, it probably is a combined problem between Flickr and Batelco connections as Ali explained. It seems to be working fine from home (I’m slapped down once again to 64k as the bandwidth threshold has been consumed!)

  16. TwoTired

    AFAIK it’s 128/128 now Mahmood, it used to be 64/256 – that is if you’re on a 1 mbit line at least.

    Just a FYI.

    Although I must say, I noticed a general slow down on every site past 2 weeks.

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  19. speak

    can batelco tell if you are running a router in your house say for desktop,laptop & dreambox all legal. A bahraini I work with who runs a computer repair store tells me batelco will detect it and slow your conection, any truth to this it sounds like batelco punish the legal people and let the illegal conections keep running. any thoughts from the masses.

  20. Ingrid

    luckily for me I could see your Flickr pics really well. Well..most of it, you had so many and I had so little time. but I have to say you have some gorgeous pictures and I am NOT exagerrating! I’d have to look again at the pic number or heading but some of those flower ones were soo stunning. National Geographic quality and speaking of which, you had a picture taken of a bee about to land on a flower..that was neat! Tonight when my husband and I went on a date, we went out and got ourselves a Sony digital camera; DSCW55, 7.2 mp. I hope to take some great quality pics like you have.
    Ingrid

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  22. Anonymous

    now two day’s i can’t open Flickr page… 😡 i don’t know what to do….

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    mahmood

    I sent en email about a couple of hours ago to inet help desk, no response yet. I can access it through a proxy but am not sure whether this is technical or otherwise.

    The email to send your inquiries to (please do!) is inetda@batelco.com.bh

    and the content was:

    Hello,

    There could be a problem with your DNS or infrastructure as I am unable to access http://flickr.com from two independent connections which has been confirmed by iNet’s helpdesk a few minutes ago too. I can access the site quite well by using proxy services or software.

    Please look into this issue as this particular site – as you may already know – is quite popular and most Bahraini photographers use it on a regular basis.

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