Working with Etisalat ADSL?

shinydiscoballs

Hi Folks,

I'm going to be coming out to Dubai in May for a couple of years to establish the initial middle-east/southwest asia presence for my company and i'm going to be working initially from home in an as-yet unknown location. As work is paying and i'm in a tech profession which will see me hosting a few servers from a home office, i'll want a 2MB internet connection - which doesn't seem to be an issue. However i'm concerned that the internet proxies and various nefarious practices of Etisalat in the UAE that i've read about (albeit on web postings that often date back a year or so) may cause connectivity issues that will get in the way of my normal modes/methods of work.

Can anyone comment on the viability of bypassing proxies using VPN or SSH tunnels to locations in the UK, Germany or USA. I have access to IT services in those locations which can rig/frig whatever I need running on whatever ports I fancy to support my activities. My primary requirement is access to the company VPN network, having easy unrestricted browsing (some of the security/encryption stuff I work with has been blocked around the region when i've visited in the past) and VOIP services to the UK, USA and India to keep office costs down (mainly skype but also a remote Avaya softphone to a corporate office).

Finally, what kind of hardware is needed for ADSL connections?. I've a good assortment from UK life that varies from alcatel frogs to average Netgear boxes and decent Cisco kit. What's the connection standard in the UAE and will it work with router hardware that I bring over with me?

All and any info appreciated!

Christian

e-lad

Yes let's do it... I'm going to come to UAE on September. We are going to make marvels

Nick81

PM me if you want ways of bypassing the proxy. So far I tried it in UAE and Qatar. Worked perfectly in both cases.

MaaaD

or you can opt to live in a freezone area where DIC is your provider and you wont have a proxy. Not only does Etisalat have a proxy they also do port blocking and other annoying shit. DIC doesnt touch your connection and has ethernet to the house. I believe this is true in all Emaar properties not sure about Nakheel.

vicarage

if you will setup in dubai, chances are the best is to do so at the freezone such as DIC or DMC. For now and untill Du becomes active as a second provider, there are no proxies. However, there are port restrictions. I know several VPNs are unaccessible due to ports being closed.

If your concern is the proxy only and assuming you dont have any funky soft you need to run that requires a special port, this would be your best bet.

HOWEVER: DIC internet is know to be slow and have limited capacity of bandwidth. This was the case up untill 2 months ago where internet was at a crawl unless you were on from 3AM to 6AM. This now seems to be solved but could surface as more people reside in the homes built by Emaar (DIC provides Emaar with both web and broadband TV access)

The only advantages to Etisalat is the speed. When they say 2MB, its 2MB. I had no problems. 2, their port range seems to be clear for most TCP and UDP protocols.

shinydiscoballs

Well.. i've built an http proxy in my UK office on a decent high-bandwidth connection and there's at least 3 flavours of VPN host that I can route via.. so fingers crossed it's not a problem. I kind of "live" on the net for work, hence the need to guarantee a clean un-messed with connection.

Thanks for the info.

SDB

smartd

you seem to have a bit of knowledge on how things work so you don't have to be too worried. Once in dubai you will find a multitude of different approaches to get yourself connected to the resources you require.

Cheers,

sniper420

Well.. i've built an http proxy in my UK office on a decent high-bandwidth connection and there's at least 3 flavours of VPN host that I can route via.. so fingers crossed it's not a problem. I kind of "live" on the net for work, hence the need to guarantee a clean un-messed with connection.

Thanks for the info.

SDB

dont worry if u have some basic knowledge of networking u can get through easily in UAE, but one thing is annoying is it's slower than here in Canada...PM me if u have any probs, there are loads of ways to get around it.