Global Ranking of Internet Speed

Hi Candidcam,

I totally agreed with your points.My home internet is too slow from yesterday and i found that Qatar is still on 80th rank.

Candidcam , could you please tell me how did you learn that speedtest.net conducted 700,000 test for 125,000 unique IPs for Qatar and for the rest.

Actually i was trying to get this figure from www.netindex.com website , but no luck for finding it on the website.

Could you please help me to find this.

Regards

candidcam, I am not asking anyone to keep his/her mouth shut. If you can't handle other people's comments and/or opinions then this is not the right place for you.

BTW see this post I've put out there about a year ago: http://www.qatarliving.com/node/967143 then you can judge if I'm a hardcore Qtel fan.

(some people they just love to talk, and talk, and...)

Adios!

I don't have any choice nor do I have anything to propose to Qtel, but it doesn't mean we cannot point out the fact that some Sub Saharan countries like Rwanda and Ghana score better in the ranking. Unless of course you are the authority here to tell us to keep our eyes close and our mouth shut. If you read again what I posted above, I never badmouthed any party and I was merely seeking clarification on what you said about number of tests versus population.

hmfaysal, inshallah!

candidcam, you are right... what can I say? Do we have any other choice besides Qtel?

What would you propose in order to improve their service?

I downloaded a 10 GB file in less than 2 hours at Qatar foundation, I get a steady 4.5 MBPS downlink throughout the day.

I hope we would see something like that in our home connections too

OK, it's not fair to compare Qatar against Korea and the US. So let's pick some other countries...

Let's go back to the list. Qatar as of today is at position 79... which is lower than ...Rwanda and Ghana. Ok, now let's look at the top 20 countries. Among them are.... Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, ... hmmm... I wonder how and what these countries have done to be ranked at top 20. I guess they didn't need to dig "submarine/underground cable to stay connected".... but oops... have I talked too much? It's not an apple and orange comparison, is it? Are we still allowed to make any comparison at all?

Jhopp, I don't question that you are right about monopoly since that's normal in any country where there's only one or two players in the game but comparing the US with Qatar is like Oranges to Apples. Your country already had broadband infrastructure by mid 90's while most countries only had dial-up or no internet services at all.

The U.S. represents +/- a 12% of the total internet population in the world. Qatar needs to run different submarine/underground cable links in order to stay connected, with an internal market that is very small. Is there any room for comparison?

What I really find questionable about this thread is that we are making a statement based in only ONE source. Of course Qatar/Qtel is far from being one of the top ISP's in the world, and they need to continue improving their services and rates, but come on, we cannot expect it to be like Korea or the U.S. don't you think?

I have seen in some countries foreign telcos who have already obtained the license to be another land line operator decided not to proceed with the plan for various reasons. So whether Vodafone would really compete head-on with Qtel as a fixed line Internet Service provider remains to be seen. They might choose to compete on the 3G mobile network area only. Who knows?

By the way, I hope this thread won't turn into a Qtel bashing thread. Monitor the global ranking just for the sake of... fun.

Vodafone won the second land line operator license in 2008, so technically Qtel isn't the solo player in Qatar anymore.

I don't think anyone here is defending Qtel, but sometimes you have to be reasonable and consider other factors as well which we might not be aware of.

The biggest problem comes from the monopoly Qtel holds as an ISP. No competition = stagnation. Look at what happened when Vodafone came along to compete in the cellular market. Suddenly call rates plummeted and there are back and forth offers to draw in customers from each company. Capitalism at its finest. Until Qtel as an internet provider has to compete with anyone, I am sure we will be stuck paying stratospheric prices and the technology will come at a snail's pace.

Shamrock I've no idea how you can defend Qtel at all. I have been here over 5 years now and internet development has come to all but a halt. A few years ago they offered the doubling of speed, but you need to look at the bigger picture. COST! 400QAR for a 4MB line? Thats absurd by any standard. Considering the infrastructure is concentrated virtually in 1 city here in this country, its appalling service. Even though 8MB speed is offered, its still restricted to a distance requirement of 800m from ISP switch to home. This negates a very large portion of users within Doha itself.

I've no big issues with the speed provided, but the cost is absurd. 4MB lines cost about 150QAR per month in my home country... 6 years ago!! Speeds have tripled / quadrupled for the same cost over that period. Where are we here in Qatar? Stone ages of internet.

candidcam, yes... you are.

Mike Shamrock, You are funny. You were the one who pointed out the number of test versus population number and I was merely giving you back the numbers seeking further enlightenment from you by asking you how to best interpret these numbers. Now you are saying I am banging my head against the wall and bit ching? Geez.

By the way, my post about denial and self-consolation was not meant for you... just in case you think so.

candidcam, do you really think I am going to waste my time with someone who loves banging his/her head against the wall? Whatever... keep on bit-hing!

Anyone who seeks improvement should not get so defensive. Denial and self-consolation will not get you anywhere.

Check out Qatar Foundation's internet speed. It eclipses most of the other providers speed by a huge margin. You just have to click SHOW EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS in the results page

i want to go also in south korea!! but it is really not bad here in qatar you know, =)

Mike Shamrock, are you saying that the ranking is not accurate due to the low sampling size or what? I only know that for Qatar, they have been conducting 700,000 tests on 125,000 unique IPs.

Iceland: 225,982 tests on 47,284 unique IPs

Oman: 200,000 tests on 37,000 unique IPs.

Ghana: 137,000 tests on 22,000 unique IPs.

So what is a better way to do the test? Care to enlighten us?

By the way, Qatar is now up to the 80th position. *yawn*

I miss my good'ol dial up internet connection. Used to pay 8 QR/hr. Sweet duck :-P

the world will see, when this will take place, lets enjoy this time the arse hole Qtel service.

candidcam, you are looking at the list but not the details in it... see how many tests have been run in these countries then compare their population with ours.

Are you sure FTTH will improve the ranking much? Isn't FTTH going to address only the bottleneck between local users and ISP (Qtel)? If the bandwidth of the link between Qatar and the outside world remain the same, will we see any significant improvement?

When it comes to technology, two or three years are considered very long time. South Korea and many other countries are working on the superfast 1-GB/s link now. By then, they will really leave many countries way behind.

I don't know about the future and what it promises but just look at the list now. You will see that Qatar is below the performance of some Sub-Saharan countries, i.e. Ghana (#47) and Rwanda (#69).

I hope the quality is good, since Huawei is carrying out that operation.

You are right, also Qtel is working on FTTH, so it is a matter of time.

...thanks to the size of their network, Kahramaa could be a fantastic competitor, connecting homes could be easy with such installations! :-)

...considering the size of the country and budgets, really it is a shame that QTEL did not offer high speed services earlier, indeed Qatar has a great advantage of being small in terms of size and population. Much easier to manage internet connections, probably the lack of proper organization lies behind such failure. Or maybe interest in making huge profits from poor infrastructure charged at skyrocketting prices. No offence it is just what I'm witnessing since i years now. Still everyday I get disconnections from a simple service such as Mosaic....

timebandit, I truly believe there will be a huge change during the next 2-3 years, if you look at the full stats, Qatar has a very large number of unique IPs considering the population and size of this country you could say they have done a pretty good job... not there yet, but they will.

Well they should get on with it then... Jeesh they have the money don't they, Qtel are not poor?

No shame in that... Qatar does pretty well considering that they don't have their own hub/backbone exit to the internet world.

Trust me, I have seen much worse than this and sooner or later once Qatar implements this project of becoming a primary internet services in the region, they would rank easily among the top 20.

Shame on you Qtel

i want a line from south korea :D

Like I said, the ranking changes every week. If I remember correctly Qatar was somewhere in the rank of 70-80 last week. Just bookmark the link and check again next week. Hopefully Qatar will improve.

Qatar is ranked 85 & 45. Behind UAE, Oman, even Saudi.

No offence to Q-tel :)