Mobile Internet in Tunisia

Tunisia’s telecommunications network is definitely still developing — there’s still no 3G, although a French operator has recently acquired the contract to make it happen. The best Tunisia can offer presently is EDGE, but there’s good news: Tunisia’s first private telco, Tunisiana, offers a freaking awesome prepaid mobile Internet package: 9 Gb per month, for 27 TD (about €14).

This just came into effect at the beginning of 2010, and we were thrilled to discover it, after spending the last month confined to 3 Gb for 39 TD. And yes, the EDGE network is actually sufficient to use up this kind of quota! Even on GPRS, which you tend to fall back to when you go inland a bit, it’s still quite usable. We’ve been getting speeds around 11 kBs on EDGE along the coast, which isn’t too shabby.

It’s available on their prepaid SIM package, one you can just pick up for 5 TD at almost any of the thousands of little outlets that show the red-and-while Tunisiana sign.

Activating it is a bit tricky, though, if you don’t speak French or Arabic. First, you have to dial a number (1222) to activate the SIM card. Then, you have to dial another number, the main support line (1111) and follow some prompts to activate the actual Internet service, or ask in the shop where you got the SIM (chances are, they won’t have any idea what you’re talking about). I had no hope following the prompts, but luckily there are some English-speaking operators there who helped me through it. Ask for them with something like “Est-ce que je pourrais parler avec quelqu’un qui parle l’anglais?” (maybe).

Then, you select the mobile plan to use by entering *124# {amount of plan} *, then call. So for me, *124*27#. Check the plan usage with *100*4#, and check your credit with *100#.

As of Jan 2010, the offerings are:

The settings are:

• APN: internet.tunisiana.com
• Username: internet
• Password: internet
• Proxy available, but you don’t need to use it: 10.3.2.99:80

YouTube is blocked, as well as a host of other things like Google Translator (for translating websites — the text version works still). Hooray for Internet censorship!

One thing we noticed is that the Internet falls over fairly regularly. We also discovered, though, that this is due to a dodgy DNS server at Tunisiana. By using, say, Google’s public DNS server (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), we fixed the problem.

Don’t ask the locals about mobile Internet — our experience is they tend to think they know more that you will, and will tell you to go with Tunisia Telecom, the public telco, which actually offers diddley squat. Tunisiana’s who you want. Their stuff is red and white — Telecom’s brand is blue-ish, so watch out when you’re buying the SIM card pack.

Oh, and if you have issues, call 1111 — don’t bother emailing them. I’ve never had a response from their email/web-based support line.

Other than that, we’ve been quite happy — as much as is possible over EDGE, anyway. Still better than what France is offering!

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