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I’m in Jordan this week for the action-packed annual Arab bloggers conference organized by Global Voices Online. Needless to say, I haven’t had much time to blog while here, but I thought I’d at least share my current internet speeds in Amman. See speed tests results above, taken just now in the hotel lobby.
Now compare these to my home connection in Beirut, where I enjoy download speeds as low as 1 mpbs and uploads as low as 0.13 mbps. 
This means the download speeds at my hotel in Jordan are up to 50 times faster than Beirut while upload speeds are up to 250 times faster!
You can visualize the results with this graph provided by speedtest.net The flat line represents last week in Beirut, while the massive spike represents this week in Jordan. 
Yet back home, government officials say Lebanon is on track to becoming the best performing country in the region in terms of internet infrastructure and penetration. 
Unfortunately, successive state policies and politics have made us one of the world’s slowest.
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Habib Battah is an investigative journalist and founder of the news site beirutreport.com. Battah has covered Lebanon and the Middle East for over 15 years and teaches journalism and media studies at the American University of Beirut. He is a contributor to Monocle, The Guardian, BBC World, Al Jazeera and others, a former fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and two-time recipient of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award. Battah's investigative work was recently recognized for outstanding local reporting by the Columbia University Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting. Battah earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Near East Studies and Journalism from New York University.

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