Qtel’s Guide to a Faster Internet Experience
Qtel today launched a new guide to maximizing Internet speed and performance for home computer users, made available for free on the Qtel Website. (download here)
The new guide – called “Qtel’s Guide to a Faster Internet Experience” – is designed to help customers improve the performance of their home computer, and features a range of hints and tips developed by Qtel’s network teams specifically to meet the needs of people in Qatar.
Qtel conducted a wide-ranging analysis of Internet performance issues in Qatar in 2008, looking at areas where customers wanted stronger performance. One of the key findings was that, despite Qatar having one of the most robust networks in the region, many customers were not fully benefiting from the full speed and reliability of the available Internet connectivity because of challenges in the customer environment.
Problems ranging from misuse of peer-to-peer download applications and the widespread presence of computer “worms” were among the challenges identified causing performance degradation across Qatar.
As a proactive response to these issues, Qtel has developed the step-by-step guide to tackling issues ranging from configuring a modem correctly, through to cleaning a computer hard drive of malware and infections.
Qtel is one of the first communication providers in the region to develop a bespoke Internet Performance Guide for its customers.
Adel Al Mutawa, Executive Director, Group Communications, Qtel said: “Qtel has very strong expertise in the field of Internet performance, and we wanted to deploy that knowledge and experience in a format that customers could easily apply. Because we have data that stretches back to the launch of the Internet in Qatar, our network team is able to quickly identify challenges and address them for home users.”
The need for a Qatar-specific guide was highlighted following the sub-sea cable break that took place over the New Year. Even when Internet capacity in Qatar was restored to 100 percent, some customers continued to report access issues and lower bandwidth than they were used to.
Upon further investigation, Qtel discovered that the computer problems were unrelated to internet capacity, but rather to issues within the customer environment. By publishing the easy-to-use guide on the Qtel site, the company believes it can help customers avoid such problems in the future.
via Q-Tel
BTW QTEL has copied most of this guide from different websites and published them as their own, isn't this considered as copyright infringement?
tsk tsk tsk bad Qtel
Stupidity has no limits
I have never heard so much tosh, not just from qtel but from some people here.
1. Bad planning for capacity. The purpose of the internet structure is because damage encountered (e.g. cut cable) is treated as a rerouting issue (go around it).
2. Business is going to need more and more capacity to serve their needs, as will the public as Qatar government will move more services online. The capacity will limit future growth in this country.
3. The reason we have the big 3 internet infrastructure players of the world in Qatar and Egypt right now is to set up new connection to the backbone to dramatically increase the capacity.
4. Blaming p2p? Oh how childish. Will qtel be blaming the online gamers, the video streaming, qtels own internet streaming services etc. plain and simple: they did not think it through. I wonder when they decided that they must have censorship that someone didn't put their hand up and say "excuse me what will be the impact on bandwidth?” heck even the Aussie found that out!
5. I have had qtel engineer come out to my home when there was severely reduced service. Their engineers blamed it on whoever was digging up their cables in the road. BTW qtel were digging up their own cables!
6. I suspect this is a precursor to the now lousy bandwidth we are getting again. mmm did qtel lose another cable again?
7. The roundtrip to sites all over such as Europe and US has no bearing on the congestion. It’s the "last mile" pipe from the backbone to Qatar that is so poor. Once on the backbone then the data has the same access speed as the rest of Europe. If you all Google up the same issue that has occurred and still is in the UK. You will see they have the same complaints as we here.
ngouray nailed it on the head. Qtel is not up to the job. I would expect a country that has vast financial reserves and grand ambitions to be able to lead the world in the communication infrastructure. If qtel could put the same amount of effort in their work as other parts of Qatar does for its building projects (pearl etc), they would be way ahead.
I ponder that if discovery channel does their megaproject program on places here in the Middle East I know for sure that qtel and their internet services could never participate unless there was a wooden spoon award.
Regards
I very much doubt that Qtel will have the money for capital infrastructure. Hence they come out and blame others rather than themselves for the problems.
It seems a running joke in Qatar that nothing is actually anyone fault IN the Country it's always something else.
Do the Qatari's really fall for this stuff, do they really believe EVERYTHING they are told ?
And to top all this off the Qatar foundation won the second mobile and fixed line franchise. HOW is that going to do any good.
Qatar appears to be moving backwards all the time, now with a global financial crisis they are going to struggle to adjust to a new economic paradigm.
Just don't hold your breath for any new bandwidth.
Yes, I'm well aware that physical distance has a part to play. I wasn't disputing that, but thanks for the analogy anyway.
The fact is that bandwidth congestion is a major problem, and one that Qtel seems to be brushing under the carpet.
Think in this way tallg ...it will take less than 4 hours to travel from California to Washigton.. but it takes 12 Hours to reach from Doha to Washigton ... did we ever blamed that Qatar Airways or any other flights flying from doha to Washigton is slow .. this is the same case for you internet traffic as well ..even if there is no congetion ...there is an obvious delay for the packet to reach the destination and come back .. which we cannot change ...because it is natural law ..
qatar.living - but that's exactly ngourlay's point; Qtel should be working to increase the bandwidth to the US and Europe, since that's where most internet sites are hosted. A lot of the problems are due to congestion, not just the ping time.
Instead Qtel are pretending that everything is fine with their network, when the outages due to cable cuts show that it clearly isn't.
Just for the sake of accuracy BackinBlack2 - Hill & Knowlton proactively resigned the Qtel account after many years of working with them. Any decent agency takes these decisions to ensure the longevity, reputation and growth of the business.
And yes - ngourlay did "attack" us about the quality of their service back then just as he does to them now. I guess having been a home and business user of internet services for many many years he is entitled to his opinion, just as you are to have yours.
yes. yes I did criticise them. all the time.
You should not compare the internet speed of the region to any other providers in US or Europe ..ngourlay ...
Most of the popular contents are in either US or Europe ..take the case of QatarLiving..which it self is hosted in Newyork .. you should not compare the speed to access qatarliving site while in qatar and in US ..as you will have a Round trip delay maximum of 20 - 40 ms while in US and it will be 4 times when you are in this region .. this is not because on any congetion ..this is just the obviuos time it takes to reach US and come back for the content .. Also for argument sake you can say why dont we have mirrors locally .. but keep in mind only less than 5 % of contents in Internet are distributed through internet ..
Moderated
when hill and knowlton (moderated) were doing PR for QTEL, were you this angry at them? Did you attack every announcement the way you do now?
Or is it only since hill and knowlton (moderated)) stopped doing their PR (got fired) that you decided to start your campaign?
Just wondering :)
In the UK, I was an academic on SuperJANET. My bandwidth was limited only by my ethernet switch. The poor guys in education city must be crying into their coffee cups if they've been used to academic backbone speeds.
The Australian government has been running tests of filtering software. They've given figures of 20 to 50 percent reduction in download speeds when filters were in place. Where do Qatar's filters sit on that scale, Qtel?
The other problem for me is a lack of any local mirrors. It screams volumes that Qtel doesn't support its network by providing local timeservers, mirrors, whois, and that when I try to send email to a .qa domain, it appears there's no backup for the flaky nameservice.
Instead of helping the locals censor the Internet, perhaps Q-CERT should be concentrating on the real problems in Qatar: a lack on expertise and investment into core TCP/IP protocols.
See there you go.... and u r comparing that with the speed we get here. of course you have a lot to say against the internet speed here :))
ngourlay the url was just to point out that you r wrong in saying defrag is not needed . in fact if you seaqrch the net u will find lot of articles to support the case.
As i stated in the begining as far as i understood the article brought out by qtel was only helping out in making the most of your present bandwidth.
It does not speak for or against upstream bandwidth crunch from qatar.
Yes since you use HFS Plus you can never appreciate what defrag does to a windows pc after its been going on for some time.
just out of curosity what was the bandwidth that you were on in uk?? if u dont mind.
Virgin aint all that my mates who play lots of online FPS gaming have had so much hassle with high pings due to they way they process packets etc, they have all be complaing to there support about inordinant lag.
dependable, I see from your job title you are a network engineer. Did Qtel really pull this advice from press releases from defrag software supplier. Don't you think that might be a bit biased?
Here's what the guy behind the research had to say after he left the company:
"Larger and faster drives have minimized the impact of fragmentation. The Windows file system tends to fragment files all on its own to a small degree, but fragmentation starts for real when the drive starts to get full—as in over 70%. "As the drive fills up, the larger areas of free space become scarce and the file system has no choice but to splatter large files around the disk. As the drive gets really full (over 90%), the file system then starts to fragment the MFT and the Pagefile. Now you've got a full drive, with lots of fragmented files, making the job of the defragmenter nearly impossible because it also needs space to do its job. "It is my opinion that a drive that is more than 80% full is not defragmentable. You can see that effect with huge hard disk drives, since they generally use smaller percentages of the drive's total free space. A side-effect is that the overall fragmentation is reduced, and the fact that these drives have faster seek times makes the effect even less noticeable.
"At the time I worked on Diskeeper, I always told people to 'defragment early and often' so that they could take advantage of the free space before their drive starts to fill up. This way, they could see a marginal improvement now, but, more importantly help, the defragmenter from getting log-jammed later on. With today's large drives, even this is not an issue."
Source: http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1216336,00.html
Of course, the real stupidity in your insistence about defragging is that I use a filesystem that defrags on the fly (HFS Plus), and I still get terrible bandwidth. Are you saying that all the Mac OS X users in Qatar are just imagining the rubbish network performance?
lol :) How I do not miss Qtel, god bless Richard Branson & Virgin Media for giving me the power of 50 Mb Broadband!!!
See how fast Qtel really is @ http://www.speedtest.net/
Is there any mention of how many people are being shared over connections? i.e contention rates. Thats the only problem i have ever found to be the reason for bad net connection these days.
@ ngourlay
http://www.scribd.com/doc/101131/Is-RealTime-Defragmentation-Needed-in-Todays
you are wrong to say defragmentation is not needed in PC today. Infact you need it more than ever....
I'm contented with my 2mbps download rate.
dependable
Exactly. Qtel don't talk about the bandwidth crunch. They say how robust their network is, and that it's running at 100% capacity.
What they don't say is how their average bandwidth to commonly used sites compares with European or North American telcos. Or, how much customers are paying per kbps to any site they actually want to use.
Qatar's pipes to Europe are becoming more congested, and it's not going to get better for several years. Qtel can blame their customers for not defragmenting, or "misuse of peer-to-peer applications", but that's rubbish. People are using the internet how they want to.
Someone at Qtel needs a boot up their backside for a decade's worth of bad capacity planning that has led to the situation we are in.
In Europe, undersea cables are cut all the time with hardly any degradation in service. In Qatar, if any of the cables are damaged, Qtel have difficulties keeping Al Jazeera on the air. Shockingly awful is my verdict on Qtel's performance.
moeopold
That's rubbish. you don't need to defragment any more. It's advice straight out of the 1990s, when a lot of people were running at capacity on their hard drives. Nowadays, people have gigabytes to spare and no fragmentation.
The problem is Qtel's bandwidth out of the Gulf, but they will never admit that it's their fault.
@ngourlay
have you read the article. where does bandwidth crunch come into discussion? ???
The article was about getting the best out of what you have.........
Obviously, there are particular issues that slow-down PC performance - when you first get a computer, everything is fairly speedy, but it slows down over time.
If you don't de-frag, you begin to crawl. If there are ways to clean-up your computer, why not use them?
The guide seems like a sensible response to me, and since it's free, there's not a lot to complain about.
RESPECT
Well to be honest for me Qtel's rates are more of an issue than the speed of their internet. I truly wish that Vodafone would be a good competitor in prices terms. Mobile broadband is still one of the many areas where Qtel should consider introducing fair rates, as I need that service much, but still think it's expensive to add to my already huge monthly bill !
its totally useless
I've gone through the document and it is crap. Not even worth your time to download as it doesn't really help you nor guide you in any way to actually speed up your connection. There are no step-by-step guides as what was written on the PR. And how would you be able to speed up your connection anyway? Unless Qtel removes the caps on download/upload speeds, I don't think Qtel can help in making the internet faster.
http://www.lifeonthespot.com
qtel site is down now
FAIL!
If the problem is with the customers' PCs, why is Gulf Bridge showing graphs at their press conferences saying there's a bandwidth crunch, and it's going to get worse over the next two or three years until new cables are operational.
Qtel misinformation.