The story began when I purchased a Etisalat Line back in early 2008. Etisalat managed to lose a client in 14 days for two times in a row. Let's see how they managed to do this brilliant work.

I have recently purchased a 3.5G USB modem from the Egyptian Mobile Broadband provider, Etisalat. So far I have tried all packages provided by Etisalat Egypt (384Kb and 3.6Mb) and I must say they're 100% working under Linux exactly as expected. Using NetworkManager 0.7 which is currently available in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, Gentoo and Debian Experimental, I managed to use the USB modem with few clicks under both KDE and GNOME. Etisalat ships with the modem a windows application to send SMS and browse SMS directory on the SIM. KMobileTools (KDE) managed to do the same job in a perfect way and I think gnome-phone-manager or gnokii can do exactly the same job.

After 12 days of half dead connection, long offline nights, below 20KBs/s download speeds over any DSL connection, almost no YouTube, hardly reading e-mails, reaching Google in above 690ms, Internet is finally back!

For the second time in a year, FlagTel cable that connects Egypt with Internet was cut near Italy. After the black January 23rd, December 19 is another offline day in Egypt thanks to the Egyptian government paying no attention to what happened earlier this year.