Jordan Telecom: ADSL Port Restriction And The Freedom Of Choice (Or Lackthereof).

August 24, 2008 by Bakkouz
Filed under Culture, Internet, Political, Social

Jordan Telecom (Orange) has enforced a port restriction policy on its ADSL Lines, which means that you can only use your ADSL Line to connect to the ISP that you are subscribed with, but cannot connect to any other ISP unless you get a new subscription to the other ISP’s. ie: you can only have one subscription to only one ISP, plus you cannot use pre-paid cards of other ISP’s, only the company you are subscribed with. keep in mind that not all Jordanian ISP’s issue pre-paid cards.

This of course presents a problem in many ways, most importantly the freedom of choice.

restricting a subscriber to a single port and limiting his access to a singe company means that you cannot have multiple subscriptions, which may not seem too important but is in fact could be essential for some users/companies in case one connection fails.

What about pre-paid cards, these cards can be very useful also as a backup service or just in case you needed a fast connection when you have exceeded your allocated monthly bandwidth limit. something I used to do since I often find myself in this situation where I have capped my monthly limit early in the month and the ISP drops down my Internet connection speed to 128 kbps, which is intolerable and too slow. but now I cannot use these cards, I must suffer till the end of the month on a really slow connection.

What is the real reason behind this policy by Jordan Telecom? What’s it real purpose? who does it really serve? surely not the customer by enforcing unnecessary boundaries and limits on the users freedom of Internet access, and surely it does not help the sales and revenue of ISP’s since they have lost a good portion of their pre-paid cards sales.

Why does Jordan Telecom insist on taking away our personal freedoms? why are their services getting worse instead of better? and who’s responsible for these kinds of erratic and simply unfathomable decisions? It is really strange that in this time and age where everything is moving forward and towards the better, and calls of freedom and openness by Jordanian Officials are issued, that we find such practices by Jordan Telecom that stab directly at our freedom of choice, that make things more complicated instead of easier, that enforce bureaucracy and rigidness. and why are such decisions made without notifying the public who are directly affected by them?

Whats next? regulating my Internet access time to certain hours? restricting the websites I can and cannot visit? Maybe there are reasons that I do not understand, and maybe its not such a big deal, but to me it is. its my freedom and my choice and I am owed at least an explanation that will satisfy and convince me. I am not sure what is going on but it is an unsettling path.

Tags: internet freedom in jordan, jordan telecom port restriction, orange jordan telecom