Dubai Forums Dubai Tech Discussions Dubai high tech talk

Dubai is a world leader in many things and is already being compared to London and New York, Beijing, etc.

The one thing they are not ahead of us their telecom, especially when it comes to the internet.

They've invested billions on real estate and other amazing attractions, so why not outdo the offerings of places like Sweden and South Korea by offering 1000mbit, gbit service to all the homes in the UAE for a very low price?

They also need to invest in more fibre to the outside world, and not rely on routing through India.

Their latency from North America should be on par with Europe or Asia, so this means less than 200 ms, compared to their current 380-400 ms.

I understand they have the need to block content they deem inappropriate, but surely we can agree that blocking VOIP and Skype services is not beneficial for anyone, except maybe one certain ISP.

Those are my thoughts, I only wish I could contact the right government officials in Dubai. They seem to do so many things right, but the one thing they should really invest in is their telecom.

Ha! I wish. Hell, I'd be happy with 100mbit, or 50mbit actually.

The fastest you can get is Du's 12mbit for 750 AED. And that is a new offer so it is showing that at least Du is investing in DSLAMs and fibre. It's 3x faster than what Etisalat is offering and runs on different lines.

There are two things that are good about UAE interenet. Firstly it is unlimited downloads, rather than a cap when you hit a certain limit. Secondly the speed you buy is the speed you get. I have a 4mbps (bits) line which is 500kBps (bytes) and I can regularly get speeds close to that number. In Australia for example I had a "24mbps" line or 3MBps and I would be lucky to get half that.

And you've hit the nail on the head with VIOP blocking. Etisalat does it so they can make money from international phone calls, and their own VoIP services that they offer.

Thanks for that info Captain Australia, I didn't realize there was another ISP in Dubai actually Do you think you could PM me your IP so I can do a traceroute, I'm wondering if DU's routing is any better. I did a traceroute to www.du.ae but that site appears to be hosted in the same city I live in, here in Canada (very ironic lol).

DU sounds like a decent ISP but I just converted the 449 AED to CAD and that works out to about $153 CAD/month for 4mbit internet.

Here in Canada we can get 5 mbit for about $40 CAD /month, but it's not unlimited but you can still get 300 GB per month. And I'm not saying internet here is impressive, I think Western Europe and places like Korea and Japan are the echelon right now.

It's nice that it's unlimited but the price is quite high IMHO.

I know Dubai and the UAE can do a lot better and it will be a real marvel when they do get fibre or ethernet to all the homes at a very low price.

I'm not actually with Du. My building is Etisalat only so I had to go with them, but at the time it didn't matter because both companies had identical plans.

Surely Etisalat will come up with a comparable plan soon. But you're right, it is very expensive. In Oz I had a $60 or about 150Dhs a month plan for 24mbps and 50 Gig downloads. Now I'm on the 449Dhs a month for Etisalats 4mbps plan.

Still, it's unlimited so it's your duty to get as much out of it as possible. BitTorrent for the win!