Today I attended the SMW Beirut event at the Mar Roukoz campus of USJ. During the event the minister of telecommunication launched the 3G service in Lebanon on a limited bases just for testing. At the end of the conference a draw was made to select 25 students from each mobile operator to test the service and I got lucky and received a SIM card from Alfa!. In total 4000 users will test it, 25% will be students and the others will be randomly selected from the population.
So for the next month I will be testing 3G in Lebanon and updating you guys here and on Twitter (@eliedh).
I have a 3GB data cap on the service and I according to the flyer I should expect speeds up to 21.1 Mbps.
The person distributing the SIM cards at the end of the conference told us that the 3G will start working tomorrow. I already placed the SIM card in an HTC Mozart phone (running windows phone 7). I got a 3G signal and I was able to call it from my other line but the internet did not work. I’ll try it later tonight on an HTC Hero (running android).
During this month I’ll try to test the connection on as many devices as I can and use as many services as I can.
Here’s a list of the devices I plan to test on (I have the devices marked in bold and can get quick access to the others):
- HTC Hero
- HTC Mozart
- Nokia N8
- Nokia C7
- iPhone 3GS
- iPhone 4
- iPad 3G
- LG Arena
- LG GD900 Crystal
- Sony Ericsson Z610
- Nokia E72
- Samsung Ace
- Samsung Galaxy S
- Samsung Galaxy S2
- Samsung Wave
Note that I did not check if all the devices support the technology used by Alfa so I’ll check before testing each one. I’ll also try to use the tethering option on devices that support it. In addition to that I might get a USB dongle to test it on my Macbook pro and on my windows laptop.
The services I use on a daily basis on my mobile are the following: Whatsapp, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook. During the testing period I’ll try to stream some videos to the mobile phones and perform a speed/ping test on every device/region. If I get the chance I will also try to place a Video call (but during the conference I heard that it does not work yet so I’m not sure about it).
I hope the service works correctly and that we can finally have decent internet in Lebanon, I’ll make sure to inform Alfa about any problem I might encounter since this is a testing period and hopefully 3G will be available to everyone soon.
If you have any suggestions or questions please share them in the comments.