Kuwait ISPs Capping Bandwidth

Updated1: Tuesday 7th, 8:44 PM

Update2: Wednesday 8th, 8:17 PM

ISPs in Kuwait have decided to gang up on residential consumers rather than step up to the Ministry of Communication's abuse. After all, it's easier (and cheaper) for multi-million companies to bully users rather than file a lawsuit against a ministry.

ISPs have setup what they call Fair Usage Policy, where they claim they have generously defined daily bandwidth cap/limits on users, to ensure that everyone has a pleasant experience. They have enforced this policy, WITHOUT NOTIFYING USERS!

Fair Usage Policies: QualityNet, KEMS, FastTelco and GulfNet. As you can see, some have blatantly put up the caps and others are doing it subtly without mentioning what the caps are.

According to them, "some" bandwidth abusers are the cause of this, as such, everyone must suffer!
It is not enough that they have increased their prices by at least 70% this year (February 2011), the increment was approved by the Ministry of Communications, and now the ministry is saying it'll fight the price increments!!! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE FOOLING?

In addition to the high prices and bad service, consumers were never compensated during the days of degraded service when there were regional cable cuts, which lasted for about 3 weeks.

If ISPs are saying that a few abusers have caused this, then why provide them with bandwidth if the ISPs can't handle it? Don't provide 24Mbps if you don't expect users to download at 24Mbps!!!

Speed (Mbps)	Max Downloadable/Day (GigaBytes)	New Cap Limit/Day (GigaBytes)
1	10.54	1.7
1.5	15.82	1.9
2	21.1	2.9
3	31.64	3.8
4	42	4.7
5	52.73	5.4
6	63.3	6
7	73.83	6.8
8	84.4	7.9

The formula is: Daily maximum downloadable content = (Speed in Mbps/(8*1024))*3600*24

As you can see, we're getting barely 15% of what we paid for! And that's FAIR! Take a look at this nice table for more info.

Consumers are enraged and are forming an alliance to file lawsuits against the ISPs to fight for their rights. It doesn't matter if the contract mentioned Fair Usage or not, it doesn't matter if the contracts says it can be updated without prior notice or not, you cannot rip us off like that.

We have games to play online, buy & download games online (via Steam), rent movies online (iTunes, YouTube, NetFlix and Hulu) and watch many kitty-infused videos on youtube, in HIGH DEFINITION.

ISPs do NOT get the right to define what the Internet is.

Update1: We're using the hash tag #q8cap on Twitter to rant and disclose information about the topic.

Update2: @justjimmar provided a chat log with KEMS on Facebook. Ridiculous reasons for the cap! (original link to chat log)

Black Ops

Black Ops: "A Black Operation or Black Op is a covert operation typically involving activities that are highly secret."

I know it's something we're not supposed to talk about and we should all be under cover (is this fight-club?!), but it's so much fun and there are so many areas to tap into to just keep it hush-hush!

Depending on the employee's seniority and job title, orders can come from multiple people/departments:

1. Company Owners


2. Audit Department


3. General Managers


4. Department Manager

My company has been unfortunate to have had multiple naughty employees and managers in which high management had to resort back to us, Black Ops, to uncover/retrieve a piece of evidence and in other cases erase records of an error one of the higher ups made so it wouldn't expose sensitive information.

At one time, highest management asked to stalk someone's corporate email and sniff news of certain criteria, along with gathering information from that employee's machine that may indicate incriminating behavior.
At that time, only 3 people knew about the operation: The top manager and the 2 Black Ops involved, and it remained that way until that employee was fired (even though we stopped looking for info a bit before that).

The fun of having such a job is that it doesn't rely on technical skills only, but on social engineering ones as well. You'd have to create an undeniable and convincing diversion at the right time for the right people to be able to achieve total stealth.

My company doesn't have VoIP deployed, yet, so we're still not required to snoop on phone calls as well (which would be quite annoying to us), but I guess it's inevitable. I hope someone comes up with a decent sound-processing software that can look for certain words in voice files before we're asked to fish for voice packets!

You can't tell whether it's an actual problem, or if it's us putting on our black hats and chuckling at your private chats with many guys pretending to be girls. Why not? Simply because our diversion is either a common problem, or we create such issues once in a while just in case we needed a diversion one day. By the time you, a naughty employee, sense a snooping act, it would be too late.

A tiny network outage, a printer driver reinstallation, sudden Operating System freezes, stealth installation of a piece of software or a background job, a quick computer restart, ...etc.

Rogue Black Ops are a bigger problem to companies than dirty & naughty employees themselves. This kind either sniffs data for fun, blackmailing or a dirty/naughty employee had bribed them to erase records of evidence (of which they keep a copy to blackmail the dumb employee later).

The only way to fight rogue Black Ops is by enforcing tight auditing on all IT infrastructure: VPN Access times, over-time claims, assigning an entry-level administrator to handle the VPN server (to make sure he doesn't have the experience to cover evidence nor having formed a relation with existing staff).
Ironically, the above may also interfere with investigating a rogue audit employee!

The company owns the data
We pwn you
Weep, threat, cry and fret
We pity the fool

Got stories to share? Kindly post as Anonymous ;)