New DSL prices in Egypt: July 2006

The Ministry of Communcations and Information Technology (MCIT) in cooperation with the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority have announced the new prices of the crappy DSL services in Egypt that will comply with the requests of people so that idiots like me don't complain of the shitty service that is provided at 3 times the price of neighbouring countries for 1/3rd the speeds and at a much lower quality.

As we know, in authoritarian regime controlled countries, its the government that sets the prices not the privately owned companies so the service providers have to abide by the set price else they will face legal actions as with what happened with the under performing linkdotnet 4 monthes ago when they reduced their prices in one of their promotion offers.

Anyways, let's go ahead with the new tarrif that introduced a capped bandwidth that is facing strong oppositions in most countries that apply them and they are on their way to extinction yet they are being introduced in Egypt and, of course, with improper calculation on the side of the ISP presumably.

256/64: Unlimited Bandwidth, 95LE/month (16.5 USD) down from 150LE.
512/128: Unlimited Bandwidth, 190LE/month (33 USD) down from 250LE.
1Mb: Unlimited Bandwidth 380LE/month (66 USD) down from 450LE.

The new capped bandwindth:

1 Mb: 10 GB/month for 150LE/month and each additional 1 GB for 8LE
2 Mb: 15 GB/Month for 200 LE/month and each additional 1GB for 8LE

No gurantee for real speed. Currently I am a 512Kbps user and my average speed is 15-25KB/sec, exactly to that of a 256 or even appraoching the ISDN speeds :S

As a last note, although Egypt has an estimate of 5 million users online, the actual number of connected phone lines whether through dial up or dsl is less than a million of the 10 million homes. This has been almost constant for the last year or more because the growth of internet usage in Egypt is now limited by the number of PCs.