As mentioned in my previous post i applied for Zain @ Home Service. They finally installed it and after doing lot of tests in and about i have nothing but good things to say about.
From applying to installation it takes them 14 days, till the end of the year the installation was free of cost but i think that must have changed by now.
When you go to apply for the line, you have to present your CPR the latest Bill (electricity, water, telephone, anything) that has the address of where you want to apply. You will have the choice of signing up for 1 year contract or for 18 months contract. This basically allows them to recover the cost of the equipment which they give for quite cheap.
If you decide to go for 1- Year contract you will be paying 40 Dinars at the signup else for 18 months you will give 30 or 35, i forgot. At the counter itself they will ask you to choose a number for your home line. You can get the attendant to keep coming up with new numbers until you find one you like just dont do it a lot else she will poke you in the eye wih the pen.
After that the waiting period begins 14 days in my case, might have changed by now. Once the 14 days gets over they will call you fix an appointment just make sure you are at home else you will have to wait another 14 days till your turn comes back.
The installation has been outsourced to Al Mufeed Electronics close to Old Palace road and the guys do a professional Job or they did in my case because i was really excited and following them all around just as a little kid does on seeing his dad or candy.
Zain @ Home requires 2 Devices inorder to work, One is a wimax router that will be fixed on your roof or anywhere outside your premises to get the connection and the other one is a switch with builtin VOIP adapter to allow you to use the phone line that zain provides.
The guys will do all the drilling and running up wires to whichever room you want, in my case they fixed it on the roof and then used the pipes inside the wall to guide it to my flat. I have posted some pictures of the hardware both inside and outside to show you what and how they fix.
The installation of Wimax Hardware took them some time as they had to drill and stuff but it took them longer to get a connection, apparently when they came to install the guys were doing some maintainence in the main server so they couldn’t receive any packets but it got sorted out and soon we were down in the flat.
This part took just 5 minutes they had the router, fixed it, configured the SIP Settings to allow me to use the phone and stuff and configured the router.
if you would want to tinker with the router later on to play with settings and stuff ask the guys for the user name and password to access the router straight away. if you don’t and later on you want it, Zain would have you reset the router do all settings again on phone. Quite a pain in the ass and i learned it hard way.
After all is said and done they make you sign the paper, don’t sign it unless you have checked everything because you wont be able to blame these guys that this is not working and that is not working later on or they did a bad job in fixing everything.
Once they left, i got down to downloading and using the internet to see how it works. I started with downloading lot of Mods for Enemy Territory’s and other games. the speed averages around 190Kbps. I was able to download 3 things at one time with one of them on 90Kbps, the other on 102Kbps and the last one on 26-28Kbps.
I started downloading at 6 an d by 7:30-7:45 i had downloaded close to 1GB worth of Stuff, actually 1Gb and 200MB.
Everything i downloaded the speed would reach the peak 200Kbps, 209kbps etc.
After i got everything, we got all 4 laptops connected started an internet game and joined we got good connection and little to no Lag. Hosted a server for friends to play and soon 10 people were on it, some from Saudi. The connection didnt lag and we were also using telephone at the same time to see how well the service performed.
As for the browsing it gets a bit slow at times, but its not like it will make you kill yourself and your computer. I still haven’t been able to figure out why it does that maybe Zain still hasn’t managed to get their DNS server proper or they are having some problem somewhere.
Looking at videos on Youtube and other site is fast and more fun. No more waiting for extended minutes so that the video can load before you play it.
The phone voice quality is good, you could be downloading stuff and still be able to hold decent conversation. The phone also works over the internet.
I subscribed to a 30 Dinars package which comes with 90 minutes of free calls to the local networks, 50% discount for 3 Zain Numbers, 12 GB Limit.
To make calls from Zain @ home is cheaper. You get free calls to other Zain @ home users. calls to all fixed line networks will cost you 10 Fils per minute, while batelco is 20 fils from land line to land line. Calls to Mobile on any network will cost you 18 Fils per minute. I remember it being cheaper before like 13 and 15 fils but i must be mistaken.
Overall, i am really happy with the performance and have been enjoying it non stop since they installed it.
Some pictures of the hardware and my computer.
This will be my street. I was fooling around while they were fixing the hardware and i took this shot. not very important.
Thats the wimax antenna/radio that they fix outside.
Another Shot of it. it really is not that big maybe the size of a A4 Size paper thickness is bit much, but its not like you will be carrying it and doing something with it.
That is the download speed. 3 Downloads at one time. I get 160-209Kbps download speed.
Hope this post was informatics, its kinda big but whatever. Gets the point across.
Cheers
Funaki
