Internet in South Surra

South Surra is a new residential building Area in Kuwait. A few years ago, there was no infrastructure. Today roads, electricity, water, sewage and most importantly Fiber to the Home, exists. The only service you can get from the fiber right now is basic telephone service.

According to KEMS, we can expect Internet service in South Surra as soon as the end of June 2007. Initially they will be offering 256Kbps for the first 2-3 months and later will go for higher speeds up to 4 Mbps. You need to have a telephone line, but the technology used is not DSL but fiber, so none of that splitter business but rather, you connect your router / switch / hub directly to the RJ45 port found in your "telephone" box. The existing fiber hardware supports up to 1.5 Gbps, but no promises yet on when this could happen.


Fiber Point


Close Up of Connectors

You plug into LINK1 and from there you can connect to the Internet.

If your fiber point is in a concealed location in your house, you need to do some wiring and extend a twisted pair cable from the box to the place where you want your Internet to be.

No news about pricing, my assumption is it will be similar to what KEMS is offering in its current DSL pricing.

Kuwait - Among the First

Different lists are floating around about Kuwait's transparency, UN New York Traffic violations, low productivity, etc. Not things we are very proud of. Well here is a little item that we can all be very proud of for our small country.

I was looking around Wikepedia and found that we are among the few countries that have fiber to the home. This list includes 8 European countries, The United States, Australia and New Zealand. In the Middle East, only Kuwait and Dubai Internet City (DIC) are included, and the DIC is only a plot of land and office complex and not really a city.

So walk tall and be proud, there are some good things here that are not very well advertised.

The Wikepedia article is here.

Fiber to the Home in Kuwait - Part 2

In March 2006, I got a little card on my front door saying that the Kuwait Ministry of Communications (MOC) wanted to honor my humble home with their magnanimous presence and offer me the gift of light speed Internet, which I wrote about here. The next day, I waited for them, and they only wanted to do a survey. In my sorrowful state and with tearful eyes I wrote a sad poem.

A few days ago, the friendly people of the MOC came to my house and brought with them a gray Alcatel box that they fixed right next to my telephone junction box. I live in South Surra which has no fixed telephone service. Everyone relies on their mobile for communication to the outside world. Others go as far as using their mobile data service to access the Internet. I have a need for speed so I had a Satelite Internet connection set up before I moved in.

So now the grey Alcatel Box is installed.



Truly an object of beauty, more beautiful than a tropical sunset.



WARNING If you are not a geek, stop here, this post goes into uber geek mode.

Opening the mysterious grey box, its secrets are revealed. You can see four RJ32 connections (telephone sockets for the non geeks reading this) and two RJ45 ports (Internet Connections), meaning you can get four standard telephone lines and two ethernet connections.




The black wire on the left is the power cable, and the thin little wire on the right is the fiber going into my home :-)

Here is a closer view of the connectors:




Now the question is, how much speed can I get? Well doing a little Alcatel research I found this Press Release about the Kuwait fiber rollout project that promises gigabits of data delivered to the home, but the question remains unanswered, how much speed can I get?

I did a little more research and found this topology diagram for a similar configuration to the one being rolled out in Kuwait.




The central 7342 passive optical network (PON) delivers 2.5Gb/s. This has a capacity to service 64 locations. Because it is a packet switched network, effectively you can receive 2.5GB/s to each home, of course you will be getting a little less because of other users.

Now all I need to do is wait for the MOC to open its doors and process my application and I will be drowning in gigabits of data.

History and Communications

After digging 100 meters deep Russian scientists found traces of copper wiring dating back 1000 years and concluded that they already had a telephone network a thousand years ago.

To overcome their embarrassment the American scientists dug 200 meters and found traces of 2000 years old optical fibers and announced that they had high-tech digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Russians.

Pakistan being so active in international affair's these days could not keep silent and after digging as deep as 500 meters Pakistani scientists found nothing and proudly declared that 5000 years ago (much before Russians & Americans) they were already using mobile phones.

No fiber today

The door bell rang,
I jumped and sang,
It was the people with the fiber,
it will make my internet run like fire,
they came in with only a string,
they did not bring any other thing,
they checked my electrical trunking,
and found it was working,
and said it was only a survey,
no need to say hurray,
I need to wait 100 nights
for my fiber to be alight,
oh the misery,
oh the torture,
no fast internet for me,
just waiting for the future.

:-(

Fiber to the Home

I live in an area of Kuwait where we have no phone lines (ok it is South Surra). So I rely on my mobile for calls. For Internet, I had DSL before in my old house and I was spoiled, GPRS / EDGE on my mobile is not fast enough. I have a need for speed, so I installed a dedicated uplink / downlink VSAT satellite dish and equipment on my roof and I get extra fast speed, it is a expensive but I figured it is worth it.

Today at work, I get a call from my maid's mobile, she tells me some man outside wants to see me. I figured it was someone trying to sell me somthing useless like my name engraved on a copper plate, or pest control, or something, so I told her not to open the door and tell him to get lost.

I come back from work today and I see this card:



If it is not clear, the card says:

Dear Building Owner,

Please note that MoC contractor who is going to lay optical Fiber Cables up to your internal box to provide telephone service failed to visit your premise today.

We will come back on:

Date: / / 2006
From: to :

Wow! Fiber all the way inside my house, lightspeed internet, video phones, cheap international calls, oops, maybe I should not say that last part.

Tomorrow, I wll be waiting for them, and I will invite them for coffee, breakfast, lunch and dinner if need be. I am going to help them break any walls, dig any holes, anything to get that precious fiber. After they install the fiber, I will ithba7 5aroof under the junction box.

I can't wait.