Zain@Home connected
This post will be a running record of my experience with Zain@Home and compare that with Batelco’s offering as I experience it on a daily basis.
They have just connected the equipment at home and it’s working. I didn’t do any tweaks or fine-tuning (if there are any, let me know please) so it’s a raw connection. The antenna is turned toward Saar which is about 3 kilometres away rather than the tower immediately opposite our house, a mere 20 meters, because the latter has not been switched on yet for some reason.
I’ve done some very quick preliminary tests on the connection immediately they installed it through dslreports.com and the efficiency is much better than Batelco. I’ll post a comparison this evening when I get home.
For now, here’s the (frustrating) results we get at the office this afternoon. There is no other user on the network other than me running the tests:
Dispicable isn’t it?
Note that the last two upload figures were tagged as possibly the upload has signs of being compressed, so those last two figures should be disregarded. But to get an average download efficiency of just 37% on average for all the servers is diabolical, especially when we are assured time and again that as a business tariffed customer, we get better contention ratio, which means that we should average much better than this crap with Batelco, but what we end up with is a ridiculous download speed of 330kbps.
When you go to the average upload speed, the real thing I was suffering from since the weekend as I couldn’t upload the daily M.Report (thanks Fashelco!), the efficiency there is a mere 23%! That means the connection – if it was running at all – was running at approximately 58kbps!
This situation is actually endemic as well, we have never enjoyed a “proper” – okay, anything better than 50% efficiency – with Batelco in the office, ever.
Dial-up speeds for BD125 ($330) anyone?
Let me test the Zain@Home for a few months and if it proves good enough, then you can guess what my next step is going to be. But its early days yet. I’ll keep a beedy eye on Zain@Home and let you know my experiences with it.
Eyad,,
Have you tried LightSpeed 2M, By the way they have their own Network as they are claiming
…
you won’t receive a dial up transfer rate
I am suffering with Zain know @ Seef Area…
Anyone tells whats wrong with Seef Area Wi MaX
Wow! Mahmood, your 2Mbps connection drops down to 128k when you bust your download threshold?? That’s the speed my connection drops down to when I bust mine and I’m only on the BD10 256k package with Batelco.
Eyad,Mjeep – This is probably the only country where customers outsmart the so called industry “professionals”. I have called Batelco on several occasions to try and get contention ratio figures off them. They hadn’t a clue what I was even talking about. “Conten-what?”
The only contention ratio they have actually published on their website is that of their Managed Inet Broadband Business which is 8:1 (starts at BD200/month)
I understand their wholesale ROs do have published contention ratios but these are wholesale offerings to external LOs so I’m still in the dark with regards to their own.
Are you sure LightSpeed are Bitstreaming & not wholesale DSL? Batelco offer both.
Oh for for all you ADSL junkies, Batelco are phasing out PPPoA !! They now support PPPoE encapsulation and LLC multiplexing so change your modem settings. VPI/VCI values stand unchanged at 8.35
I applied to Zain. And I am suffering
20 Days no installation or date of installation too.
More on my blog.
That’s quite unfortunate.
My advice is to not lose your cool with the call centre girls and boys, just ask – politely – to escalate the call to the head of installations or at least the shift supervisor and explain to him or her your frustration. I am sure they will accommodate.
My experience is that they depend on third party installers who aren’t really up to the mark. Maybe that’s how Zain saves on costs, but they have no idea of how much damaging this is to their brand image; fantastic manners on the phone, really helpful all around, and they make you feel important, but come installation time, they send out a monkey whose more interested in hammering a few nails on the wall, pick his nose and wipe the resultant goo on YOUR wall and then walk away while leaving all his rubbish – including goo – behind!
I seriously suggest that Zain invests time and effort into educating its monkeys to the value of politeness and at least the appearance of professionalism. It would do them a world of good.
Mahmood,
in my line of work i had to deal with many vendors and installers for Wimax devices, you can simply solve the time of installation problem by doing a solid procedure, zain should know better really.
I agree.
They do indeed. They’re called BATEC (Bahrain Advanced Technology) haha what a name! I had the unfortunate displeasure of having to deal with them.
The guy that came and installed the equipment at home was from the village next door, and although I didn’t ask, I am fairly sure that he’s just a simple electrician and not affiliated with Batec or any of the other big players in the market. He didn’t know how to use a computer beyond starting up a specific application and looking at the numbers it spew out.
Mahmood, I don’t know if this is too much to ask, but for those of us without Wimax, it would be nice to see some pictures of what the installation looks like, what hardware they installed etc.
It make a nice geeky contribution to your flickr account
I applied for Zain@home when it was first released.. around october ’07. Since then i’ve been suffering… First of all, it took them over 2 months to before they installed anything (im not lying), and that was only after repeated calls to their ‘helpline’, numerous threats and other general ridiculousness. I even tried to cancel my contract before they connected me, but they just got confused. At one point, after i had filed a handful of official complaints, i was promised it would be installed within a week. I then got a phonecall from someone who promised to be there on the same day, sometime between 12pm and 3ish. I waited. Nothing. I called back, his friend answered and i could hear an xbox in the background. And laughter. And then they said ‘tomorrow tomorrow..” at which point i reminded him that tomorrow was friday. “ohhh.. sunday okay.. Sunday” and then he hung up and turned off his phone (again, not a lie).
Sunday came and still nothing. I called Zain to complain, from my batelco simcard- so i was being billed for the long, ridiculous waits on their ‘helpdesk’, to add insult to injury. They promised me they’d resolve it ASAP. I waited some more- about a week or so. Finally i’d had enough. I called and screamed, tried to get the mobile number of the supervisor (no luck), back and forth, on and on… It was easily the worst, worst, worst customer service experience i’ve ever experienced. Ever. Anywhere.
Then one day out of the blue someone called me. I was on my way out, and it was 7pm, but i decided that i’d wait and see if the powers that be at Zain would be generous enough to send someone my way. And they did.
I was presented with a pair of twentysomething youths barely capable of speaking English and unable to answer any questions. They were laughing, pushing the box with the dish and router along the floor with their feet and utterly useless in every way.
They didnt provide a stand, hoping that there’d already be one on the roof of my apartment building. They found one, eventually, but to my bewilderment, they didnt have any tools, and even asked me if i happened to have any massive concrete screw-things. I laughed, and waited. And waited as they went about chatting and pretending to do something. And i waited. And then, after about 3 hours of waiting, they were kind enough to inform me that even if they managed to connect me on this night, it would be a few days before my internet was up and running. So i went out.
After the weekend i tried to follow up with Zain, only to be told that someone would be coming to install my internet shortly. I informed them that i already had a dish on the roof, but they hadnt connected it. They seemed stumped. A few days later someone else came over, some clearly more senior and perhaps the only person @ Zain who was even remotely helpful. He was shocked by what i told him, and even more shocked by what he saw on my roof. He was efficient, fixed it properly and had me up and running in a couple of hours- i applied in october and by December 27th my internet was up and running. Hooray.
Still, even though it’s occassionally decent, for the most part Zain internet is awful. The speed fluctuates, they dont have a facility to check bandwidth (maybe they do now, but i’ve given up on calling them) and now, my upload speed DOES NOT EXIST. At all. Whatsoever. I was trying to send a 120kb attatchment and it is not possible. Speedtests timeout on the upload bit. It’s abysmal.
I called them to complain some more, they were all polite and standoffish and the next day i recieved a text message telling me what my case number was. If i wanted to follow up, i’d have to call 107. AGAIN. Why should i follow up? I already waited on hold for twentysomething minutes, and now they want me to do it again? Who trained these people?
Right now i’m languishing with no upload speed. I cant send emails, chat or do anything else that the internet is for. I dont even know if this longwinded post will go through. Im absolutely, utterly, completely fed up.
This story is true, and i even omitted a handful of ridiculousness because i’ve either blocked it out or cant be bothered typing. At one point, during my back and forths with Zain helpdeskers, someone called me.. i think it was at the beginning of December. He wanted to ask.. get this.. HOW MY ZAIN @ HOME PACKAGE WAS, AND IF I WAS HAPPY WITH THE SERVICE. I laughed so hard i almost cried, and then proceeded to berate the poor chap.
The only one slightly halfdecent thing that came of this was a brief window of unlimited bandwidth, which im sure you’ll be delighted to know, i exploited to the max.
Avoid Zain. It’s anything but.
I don’t have the same extreme experience you’ve unfortunately had with Zain Tariq, though the experience is less than exemplary.
The latest is that I’ve started to have a problem connecting to my server in the office, which has a dynamic IP provided by dyndns.org. I have gone through many things (including upgrading its software to the latest and resetting and double-checking the configuration) before trying to call Zain to find out if they have started blocking dyndns or anything silly like that.
I called the helpdesk and asked the guy simply to try to connect to the server from his computer, to be absolutely flabberghasted at the reply: “I don’t have Internet connection here, I have to just register the address and escalate it for ‘them’ to check and we’ll get back to you”!!
Unbelievable. I could connect to it through a loopback with our office Batelco subscription and I have been just too busy to go through the rigmarole of trying to get this thing fixed. I will try to connect to it from an external Batelco line and if I could, I will cancel Zain@Home and be happy with any penalty they apply. Life is just too short to put up with substandard service.
Just an update… instead of a callback from tech support, i got a bill and a plant. A plant! Seriously, they sent me a plant! Maybe the oxygen it produces will help my upload speed…
I’d inspect that plant carefully. It might be bugged
Anyone care to share the cost of a 100Mbps leased line from Batelco? It only costs BD37,800/month (almost half a million Dinars a year) haha
Sell it to 2000 subscribers and it would cost BD18.9 a month, assume a contention ratio of 80:1 or something… could that work and you could make money out of it.
Oh hang on.. that might be Lightspeed’s business plan!
Don’t mean to rub it in but Oman’s ISP ‘Omantel’ are launching (or have launched?) their ADSL2+ services this month… in a word? Wow!
Residential offering:
1Mbps | 18BD/month
2Mbps | 28BD/month
4Mbps | 38BD/month
8Mbps | 96BD/month
Business offering:
1, 2, 4, 8, and 16Mbps which will cost you 347BD/month… which by our standards is pretty cheap considering the only high speed business package here (Zain@work) will set you back a cool 400BD/month for 4Mbps.
Affordable broadband = good Global Peace Index ranking
My experience with Zain is unfortunatly is a disaster. i subscribed Zain e-go 7 months back anf in the first three months it was working perfectly in Salmaniya area. Then it starts misbehaving.I cant download or uplad anything, end the line got disconnceted in every 4 min. After a number of call i spoke one of the supervisor who admitted that they have problem in Salmaniya area, but no action is been taken. Now i swited back to Batelco and atleast i can send emails now. Thank betelco!
Sam/
I think u Work for batelco or own shares.
Why would Bahrain Sites matter most?…they are Mamboo stuff that Non Cares about.
This is what happened a year ago…Maybe it was you!
Batelco lies about the internet speed
Check this case:
I called Batelco inet serivce and I talked to one the seniors in Customer relations.
I asked him if the speed is slow with adsl 40 BD one.
he said, no.
I said I tested the speed on several speed check sites and all are saying very slow.
He said you check with our site for speed.
I said I already did do that and said that the speed is Perfect.
He said what it is.
I said how come all the other sites say it’s slow.
he Said “we” don’t support these sites. (What does that mean?)
…so I said …If I buy 1 KG of Fish from the market for 2.00 BD.
and I go home and weigh it and say 1/2 KG….I then go Mr. Friend…and weigh there and Says 1/2 KG….
Then I do the same for 5 others…all saying 1/2 KG.
He said…That is not under our “Procedure”….
I said I do not care about your procedure…I want my money’s worth of the INET speed.
He kept going back to the site of Batelco….I said I do not care for that either.
He then needed time to think on what to say.
Came back and repeated more shit to me…
I said…OK do you give me speed? He said Yes.
said….What is the…he said 1 MGBS for download.
I said OK…does make a difference from USA or UK or Japan…etc…
he said Yes…I said would be slower…He said Yes.
I said OK…where will get the speed of 1 MGPS from?
He said…Bahrain.
I said OK…let do the test…
IF I upload 60 MG into Batelco Host.
And Download it…Should it take 1 Minute?
60 MG/60 Sec = 1 MBPS…Right?
he said yes…
I said let do it at your office in Batelco any time you like…I have space in a Host in Batelco servers.
He refused and accused me for “NOT Cooperating”…(?????!!!)…Hello???…what the hell is this?
Liers!!!!!
They Might say We Gave an Antana for wireless for “Free”?
Test it yourself as many times as you like….call them 17-881188 and talk to the idiots.
email them and give them crap people please!!! helpdisk@batelco.com.bh
Email your everyone you know!!
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/
http://www.auditmypc.com/internet-speed-test.asp
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Hey dude what speed did u got while doing the test on batelco website ; cz I am using 2M batelco and according to the ratio to compile transfer rate to the actual bandwidth it is more than enough
Transfer rate=bandwidth (1-15%) / 8
It is much better than my cousin whose next to my house with Zain and rarely get a transfer rate of 1M.
I am not saying that Batelco is woooooow but they are the best
Around the same as U.
Batelco is the best only ” In Relative way”
They are all shit.
see guys one to this:
When U call some service Provider.
1)Get the Name and Title of person that will lie to you latter.
2) Ask Him / Her if they are authorized to talk to to customers.
3) Say Your story (Most Likely for the 10 th time)
4) If he Lies again…Stay calmed
5) get his email.
here is what do with the rest
Email Everyone in the company Including himself
about his lies
Hold him responsible for what he / she said.
Email his name to Zain Batelco…+ all other Momboos
By Coping and pasting…
try this…
Paste Like this Into TO: (For email)
example@batelco.com.bh,example@batelco.com.bh,example@batelco.com.bh,example@batelco.com.bh ……etc
So that they get it well
Use his Name in the subject
and send as many as you can
Hehe
I think u reach the situation that I have reached when I used zain & light speed
Zain Call Center:
They told me we supply everything and our router is wireless but when I received it. It took them a day to reply back to me that I have to buy an B.D 40 Access point to have a WiFi at my home
Light Speed:
It took them a week to reply with stupidity that their Fair Usage policy applied to there new unlimited package is something the customer can’t know and it will be applied if I exceeds the normal usage which also I can not know and which made it worse even that the reply that I received was from a top manager not from the supervisor that is on the call center cz their call center was outsourced
Hehhhehehehe
Where is the TRA we need speeds and usage just like the gulf countries
hey guys! i’m a computer enthusiast and a pro gamer
i just transferred from batelco to zain@home, as a gamer, im interested more at pings and trace routes.
here’s my speedtest result:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/317148756.png
check the “PING”, testing on a local server having a ping of 320 = 50 mi. wow. this is a lot of lag in a game. im in a manama district. im wondering if pings in other places like adliya or salmaniya has a lower ping. plz give me ur comments on this
It’s Batelco’s turn to screw up today.. we cannot send any emails from the office because their cloud leads to a dead-end!
traceroute to 69.20.9.79 (69.20.9.79), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 gbps.gateway (192.168.1.254) 1.402 ms 1.191 ms 1.100 ms
2 89.148.21.1 (89.148.21.1) 20.134 ms 18.740 ms 18.930 ms
3 84.255.160.105 (84.255.160.105) 20.439 ms 22.167 ms 121.425 ms
4 84.255.160.74 (84.255.160.74) 30.733 ms 20.409 ms 20.287 ms
5 89.148.62.22 (89.148.62.22) 20.441 ms 89.148.62.18 (89.148.62.18) 20.722 ms 89.148.62.22 (89.148.62.22) 21.376 ms
6 89.148.62.21 (89.148.62.21) 20.196 ms 19.868 ms 20.575 ms
7 172.17.2.66 (172.17.2.66) 19.595 ms 20.377 ms 19.472 ms
8 172.17.2.53 (172.17.2.53) 417.715 ms 491.110 ms 346.508 ms
9 193.188.97.1 (193.188.97.1) 47.426 ms 21.383 ms 20.966 ms
10 193.188.97.2 (193.188.97.2) 99.042 ms 449.623 ms 24.205 ms
11 193.188.97.1 (193.188.97.1) 21.867 ms 26.132 ms 20.107 ms
12 193.188.97.2 (193.188.97.2) 433.547 ms 25.453 ms 379.083 ms
13 193.188.97.1 (193.188.97.1) 23.697 ms 21.791 ms 22.229 ms
14 193.188.97.2 (193.188.97.2) 143.747 ms 198.903 ms 79.524 ms
15 193.188.97.1 (193.188.97.1) 22.352 ms 131.371 ms 24.573 ms
16 193.188.97.2 (193.188.97.2) 255.244 ms 30.255 ms 24.162 ms
17 193.188.97.1 (193.188.97.1) 21.350 ms 21.607 ms 21.597 ms
notice the repetition at the end.
In their favour though, the lady at the other end of the line actually knew what I was talking about, acknowledged the fault and said that she had a report from another user with the same problem today so she will escalate it further up the chain.
Unfortunately until now the problem has not been resolved. I had to go home, and to Zain (which is soon to be disconnected!) to send my emails!