BEIRUT: The absence of a proper broadband network in Lebanon is affecting the flow of investments to the country according to Lebanese Information Technology (IT) professionals. “Many foreign investors are reluctant to establish businesses in Lebanon due to low speed of broadband connectivity which affects their production capacity,” said Amer Tabsh, a professional technical adviser. One of the best examples in this area, according to Tabsh, is the lack of support offered by the government to Google Inc. in delivering their services from Lebanon. “Google has offices all over the world, but if you dial their office numbers in Lebanon nobody answers since they were unable to place their servers in our country,” he said. Tabsh explained further by saying that their main servers are not available in Lebanon and the website address ‘www.google.com.lb’ operates from Jordan because of their low cost of internet services,” he added. Tabsh criticized the government’s lack of understanding about the importance of the availability of a strong broadband network in Lebanon in the areas of education as well. “The American University of Beirut was planning to give an online course which is accredited by US universities. However it was not able to complete its project due to the absence of the required internet speed,” he said. “Jordanian students, on the other hand, were able to benefit from that course.” Tabsh said that the cost of internet services in Lebanon is 30 percent higher than that of Jordan. In fact, Lebanon is known to be one of the most expensive countries in the Arab world when it comes to internet services yet has the slowest internet connections. “I have a 2Mb speed ADSL connection and I only pay 200 Egyptian pounds which is equivalent to $36 per month,” said Mo’nes Sadeq, director general of ITL and, a professional technology services firm in Egypt. In contrast, the price of a 1MB speed of ADSL in Lebanon is provided to consumers for $70. Egypt is one of the most advanced countries in the region regarding IT infrastructure. Internet services are widely available everywhere and cheap. The number of internet users in Egypt reached 7,000,000 – the most in the Middle East. Sadeq said that the internet sector in Egypt was supported by the government which huge subsidies to internet services providers, allowing them to provide their services at low costs. Egypt is not the only country in the region to enjoy such low rates and high speeds; Saudi Arabia provides its consumers with even better internet services than those offered in Egypt. “We in Lebanon get the 512KB speed of ADSL for $45 while with $50 in Saudi Arabia you can buy a 5MB speed,” said Tabsh. Lebanon’s high cost, low speed internet services are partly due to the fact that the internet sector generates a good percentage of the government’s revenues according to Cisco General Manager in the Levant region Fadi Moubarak. “I believe that the government has to be able to secure other sources of revenues for it to be able to decrease internet services costs in Lebanon,” he said. “They do not even allow the usage of VoIP technology because they are generating huge profits out of the regular international calls,” he added. VoIP is a technology that allows telephone calls to be made over the internet. VoIP converts analog voice signals into digital data packets and supports real-time, two-way transmission of conversations using Internet Protocol (IP). VoIP offers a substantial cost savings over traditional long distance telephone calls. Moubarak also links the high internet prices to the rare availability of fiber optics in Lebanon which is directing the focus to the use of microwave technology. Fiber optics use glass or plastic fibers to transmit data. A fiber optic consists of a bundle of glass threads, each of which is capable of transmitting messages modulated onto light waves. It has several advantages over traditional metal communications lines. Fiber optic cables have a much greater bandwidth than metal cables, which means that they can carry more data. They are also less susceptible than metal cables to interference. “Microwave technology is more expensive than fiber optics. When we allow companies to use fiber optics on a large scale, and when the information highway is allowed to be available inside of Lebanon, then data can be transferred at a faster pace and at a low cost,” Moubarak added. The cost of communications is one of Lebanon’s major issues. Partnership for Lebanon, a US-led initiative launched in 2006 to assist reconstruction efforts after the war with Israel that year, has made developing Lebanon’s information and communication infrastructure a priority. The Partnership is also working with the government owned telecom operator, Ogero, to increase Lebanon’s international bandwidth capacity. To help educate local stakeholders about the benefits of a modern communications infrastructure, the Partnership and in coordination with the Lebanese Broadband Stakeholders Group (LBSG) Committee which represents economic councils, private sector leaders and professional associations, launched a recent advertising campaign. The objective of this campaign was to raise awareness and educate the public on the need of a true broadband infrastructure in Lebanon. The campaign’s second objective was to drive people to sign the broadband manifesto, which aims to reclaim Lebanon’s position as a regional leader in the provision of products and services. The manifesto demands access to 100MB per second for all citizens and businesses by 2011. It also states that broadband should no longer be used loosely to refer to speeds of less than 1Mb per second. It also requests that broadband prices in Lebanon should be comparable to the lowest prices available in the most competitive markets around the world. The Partnership is also working with the Telecommunications Regulatory Agency (TRA) to develop a national broadband strategy designed to bring broadband to Lebanon’s urban and rural communities. The TRA mission is to establish a regulatory environment that enables a competitive telecommunications market to deliver state-of-the-art services at affordable prices to the broadest spectrum of the Lebanese population. The TRA made efforts to reform the sector when it created telecom law number 431 in 1996. The law was published in 2002 but it still needs to be be implemented in order to liberalize the telecom sector and create competition, which will in turn decrease the prices of these services. “The political decision to liberalize had not been taken at the highest level until, I think, what we have seen in the ministerial declaration, which says that there is a policy decision to liberalize,” said TRA CEO and Chairman Kamal Shehadi. “There will be some opposition from vested interests and one of them could be the illegal cable business,” he added. “There will also be some opposition from some of the operators who are afraid that they lose [their] market share.” When asked about the solutions that the privatization of the sector would offer, he said that more important than privatization is the liberalization of telecommunication in the sense of introducing competition. “Introducing competition in the mobile business is a must and has to be part of any privatization of a mobile business,” he said. “When you open the way to competition you can expect to become like other Arab countries, if not better.” Shehadi believes that many parties share the responsibility of the dire situation of broadband in Lebanon. “You have the legacy of the past and an interrupted series of temporary … and half baked measures, never thinking of making a change that is good for the long run,” he said. Riad Bahsoun, an IT expert and the general manager of Telecommunication Information Technology in Lebanon, holds the Lebanese government responsible for the absence of a proper broadband network. “The government says that it does not have enough money. It is not an issue of money. It is an issue of establishing a national broadband initiative (NBI),” he said. “NBI is under the patronage of the Telecommunication Ministry and the Administrative Affairs Ministry and has to be at the government level,” he added. “It impacts the work of all the public agencies, the ministries, the governmental entities and consumers. It is a national problem.” Bahsoun insists that there is no valid reason for not having broadband in Lebanon. “In Lebanon, the decision makers and especially the ministers always ask the telecom sector to adapt their vision to their policies. This doesn’t work,” he said. “Ministries have to adapt to the needs of the people because they are here to serve people,” he added. Bahsoun’s point of view about privatization is different than that of Shehadi. Bahsoun believes that no government with a good vision and sense of responsibility would go to privatization in such circumstances. “Privatization means that you are giving away your responsibilities, it is not a project or a policy but it is a sanction,” he added. “It is as if you are saying that those who were responsible for this sector are not qualified.” He urged the government to spend money on the deployment of broadband in Lebanon because its absence is greatly affecting the flow of investments to the country. “The United States has a very advanced broadband network, yet President [Barack] Obama allocated $100 billion to the broadband initiative,” he said. Bahsoun added that Lebanon could receive in 2010 and 2011 some 5,000 – international companies especially with the presence of a crisis in Dubai. “These companies will move to Lebanon if they feel that they will be saving with productivity cost and operations expenditures,” he said. “The 18000 Lebanese working in the Gulf can move back to Lebanon with their companies instead of losing their jobs.” He believes that more job opportunities can be created as well. “A net of $0.8 billion can be generated if a good policy is adapted,” he said. Some global statistics in this area were given by Isabelle Moro, head of the external affairs of the GSM association a month ago during the opening of the ninth Global Symposium for Regulators (GSR) and second Global industry Leaders Forum (GILF) conference held at the Habtoor Grand Hotel Convention Center in Beirut. She said that the spending in the ICT industry is expected to reach $80 billion in the next five years, which includes $25 billion allocated to broadband alone. “This will contribute to 3 or 4 percent of the global GDP and create 25 million job opportunities while providing access to internet for 2.4 billion people,” she said. Berytech Chairman and CEO Maroun Chammas shares Bahsoun’s opinion, saying that establishing a proper broadband network will stimulate economy growth and offer more employment. “People won’t need to go to Dubai media city anymore,” he said. Chammas added that the broadband issue is not related to the availability of money to invest in this field but is instead an administrative matter. “There is no clear policy as to who is responsible for what. There is a lack of clear vision and conflict in ownership between the TRA and the ministry,” he said. Chammas said that there was no agreement in the previous ministry on who was leading what. This resulted, he added, in lots of delays in implementation, preventing consumers from receiving the proper services. Chammas too lays the blame at the door of the government. “The government has the monopoly of the international bandwidth. The ministry today is the one who distributes the bandwidth,” he said. “The private sector is still waiting to get the necessary licenses to be able to provide these services. It can do nothing if it asks for bandwidth or leases lines and the government does not provide them with their demands.” His comments were echoed by Bahsoun who said that the absence of sufficient bandwidth in Lebanon is opening the way for illegal service providers to acquire a big share of the market. “All of this has also opened the way to buying bandwidth from providers related to Israel – that’s what happened in Barouk station,” he added. Illegal internet networks made headlines last August when a microwave transmission connection installed on top of the Barouk Mountain in the Chouf region in Lebanon was alleged to have been taking bandwidth from Israel. The official sector has a bandwidth of only 1 GB per second while the Israeli antenna of Barouk alone had 10 GB per second. Ironically, this incident cast light upon how technically uncomplicated it would be to increase bandwidth in the country. “The government has received a lot of offers from Arab countries to receive additional bandwidth through the sea or land and none were implemented,” said Bahsoun. Intel operations manager in Lebanon Alexander Loucas seemed to be the most optimistic of them all. Loucas said that the government today is aware more than ever before about the necessity of providing the population with high speed connections. “Wimax has started in Lebanon but at a very small scale. It will be launched soon with huge campaigns all over Lebanon,” he said. He added that Intel is planning to release in the coming year Wimax embedded laptop computers. Wimax is a telecommunications technology that provides wireless transmission of data using a variety of transmission modes, from point to multi point links to portable and fully mobile internet access. It can provide up to 10 MB per second broadband speed without the need for cables. “With a good implementation, Wimax can provide a high speed connection at low costs,” said Loucas. Copyright (c) 2009 The Daily Star