About
Kuwait’s MOC Situation
From what we understand, the situation with Kuwait’s Ministry of Communication is that they pay a high price for incoming traffic. Services that are accessed from abroad are costly and, typically, the majority of this cost comes from bittorrent and file-sharing traffic. Further evidence of this is MOC’s ongoing effort to block torrent sites, while ISP companies (such as United Networks) have began to offer cheaper packages under the condition that peer-to-peer activity remains capped.
A Workaround
If we are to reduce incoming traffic, there must be an alternative local source for files and media. This is where Dewaniya Net comes in. Essentially, Dewaniya Net is a private local Kuwaiti file-sharing network that aims to do just that.
The Concept
The concept of Dewaniya Net started out when we noticed how groups of friends got into the habit of bringing their hard drives with them to dewaniyas and gatherings to share what they’ve downloaded or collected. It quickly became apparent that there is a ton of content that people are consuming or storing, but there remains a social barrier that unless you know them personally, it’s awkward to ask for access to that data.
The Advantages
- Lowers Kuwait’s MOC costs
- Theoretically faster file transfers between Kuwaiti peers
- Rare content of Kuwaiti-specific interest (such as masra7iyat, etc…) can be distributed easier
- Tears down social barriers
Implimentation
Dewaniyas will serve as the backbone of this network since costs can be distributed between the dewaniya members. This is not necessary however; if regular home users don’t mind, and can afford having their machines run as file servers for extended periods of time, then kudos to them.
You can find out more details on how to build and setup a dedicated low-cost file-sharing server in the Hardware and Software pages of this site.
