This is to tell anyone out there thinking of Lightspeed Communications as a substitute ISP: “you’re going to have to fight for your rights”.
My experience with Lightspeed Communications – an ISP in Bahrain - started mid July 2010. I subscribed to their 1Mb service mainly because of the 20GB threshold and BHD 15/- price. At the very start I had tested their video streaming with no problems using Youtube. Good results were also achieved when I used http://speedtest.net. But this lasted no more than two weeks, and since then the service was nothing like what it started with. The benchmarks again proved this, and as they were a small player, I naturally smelled a scam.
Their customer service was good when you could get them, but usually unresponsive and lack basic tools to inform them of your situation, when other ISPs provide those tools to their customers (e.g. no way to check your threshold/consumption). Luckily I could get hold of higher management who seemed to care for my complaints and got someone to call me. The lady (Zahra) was professional and seemed to hold a supervisory position. She left the company a few days later! I later learned they had just lost both their marketing and technical directors too.
The really worrying part was when it came down to their technical support representative. Clearly I was either talking to complete idiots or the scammers themselves. They tried to prove that the line truly gives out 1Mb, even though - strangely - that only seemed to work with their own site’s benchmarking tool or when I used a download manager that would multi-segment a single file. I easily sensed how the scam worked; they would cap the throughput of any socket connection to no more than 25 kbps. That way, a multi-segment or multi-file download could still reach 100kbps, and even web browsers use multi-socket connections to fetch different parts of a web page. But not video streaming! So in essence, you would be paying BD 5/- extra for Batelco’s 256 kbps service. The technical guys – if this was the case - were the scammers, but the company must have authorized it at a higher level at some point.
Got Em! Since I knew the technical support rep couldn’t run or hide from the fact of not being able to smoothly play Youtube (SD and not HD even!) on a 1 Mb service, I hung on to that … tightly. That’s where they would have a problem, and that’s what I hooked my complaints to; no Youtube streaming, no shut-up from me! I threatened to terminate the contract on my terms and I kept sounding my voice to their management. Guess what: without a hint stating what the problem was, and while still denying anything was wrong, the day after I stormed at their tech rep on the phone, all video streaming and full bandwidth capabilities (even on single-segment downloads) started working normally! What can I say.
To anyone using Lightspeed Communications in Bahrain: KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. I would like to hear experiences from others in the comments here as well.
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