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.