Posts and telecommunications in Lebanon
Postal services and telecommunications have long played an essential role in Lebanon, a small country with an expansive diaspora, a vivid media landscape, and an economy geared toward trade and banking.The sector's history has nonetheless been chaotic, marked by conflict but also, and perhaps most importantly, a deeply rooted legacy of state control, weak competition, and intense politicization.[3] By contrast, French postal services could rely on the private shipping company Paquebots de la Mediterrannee, which ran a steamship line between Marseille, Alexandria, and Beirut three times a month.In the late 19th century, French post offices liaised between Lebanon's expanding diaspora in the Americas and the homeland, going as far as to collect and deliver mail directly in villages as of 1906.France, as a mandatory power, formed on 1 January 1921 an "Inspection Generale des Postes et Telegraphes" covering both Lebanon and Syria,[8] before the two countries enjoyed their own separate postal administrations in 1924.[22] Writing in 1914, the Daily Consular and Trade Reports of the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor announced that the government of Lebanon was making plans to connect its seat in Baabda, above Beirut, to major cities across the country, thanks to a 150 miles of cables on metal posts.[21] By 1957, demand for telephone services outpaced supply, as seen in the contracts signed with Ericsson, to expand the network with 25,000 new lines in the country's main cities, and with Siemens, to build a state-of-the-art radio transmission station.Its operation and maintenance was handed over to Sodetel, a company specifically established in 1968 for the purpose of managing this cable, and co-owned by the Lebanese government (50%), France Câbles et Radio (40%) and Italcable (10%).One notable target for criticism was Tony Frangieh, who in the early 1970s was appointed Minister of Posts and Telecommunications in a government presided by his own father Suleiman.[45] Rehabilitating, expanding, and modernizing the infrastructure befell well-established foreign companies, namely Ericsson and Siemens, along with Alcatel, each of which was allotted a certain part of the country.[27] The contract, tendered in 1993 and signed in March 1994, cost Lebanon $430 million[46] and enabled the country to upgrade its telephone switching systems from an aging analogue technology to digital.[44] In parallel, the government moved fast to introduce the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM): Indeed, cellular phones were seen as an appealing alternative to cabled telephone.[53] Radio Liban remains deeply associated, in Lebanon, with this economically prosperous yet politically tense era, not least for introducing the still lively tradition of broadcasting Feyrouz every morning, to lighten the atmosphere after the daily news.[30] Voix du Liban or Voice of Lebanon, which stakes a claim to being the first commercial radio in the country, was founded in 1958 by the Christian party Phalanges, in the context of a brief spell of domestic strife.Although the government successfully shut them down, it chose not to confiscate their equipment, paving the way to an explosion of illegal broadcasts in the more favorable context shaped by the civil war.[63] As the civil war set in, the government took the initiative to nationalize and merge CLT and Tele-Orient: In 1977, it formed Tele-Liban, a semi-public company half-owned by the state, and granted a 25-year monopoly on television broadcasting.[61] The war also provided the country's political factions with a suitably chaotic environment in which to start their own televisions, in the absence of any mechanism to officially license more stations.[65] In 1994, the Audio-Visual Media Information Law brought to an end Tele-Liban's official monopoly, while disbanding the more than 40 unlicensed and technically illegal television stations that had mushroomed during the war.These channels are backed by prominent families and the country's diverse political factions, without which they would struggle to survive; advertising revenues indeed would prove insufficient to support even ten of them.[73] Actual data, however, is patchy at best: The graph below shows the rare years since 2000 for which Lebanese authorities provided figures to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is the relevant agency of the UN.Lebanon is connected to the internet through three submarine fiber-optic cables, which provide the bulk of its "international bandwidth", meaning the maximum quantity of data it can transmit to or receive from the rest of the world.Lebanon's heavy dependence on I-ME-WE was on display in July 2012, when the country witnessed complete internet blackouts due to maintenance work on the cable which Ogero reportedly failed to announce.[88] Even as officially reported, Lebanon's increase in international bandwidth has not helped the country significantly improve its ranking on a global scale, despite the government's repeated pledges to "catch up" with the rest of the world.In the absence of a law clearing organizing how infrastructure (notably ducts) should be shared, each internet service provider had to build their own, redundant, local networks to connect the backbone to end users.[104] Just as cellular phones were introduced in the 1990s to make up for a degraded cable network, wireless internet services were offered for the first time in 2005 to palliate for an absent DSL infrastructure.[86] In March 2007, Solidere, the Lebanese company for the development and reconstruction of the Beirut Central District, deployed a Broadband Network in partnership with Orange Business Services.The project aimed to improve the digital industry in Lebanon by providing, at competitive rates, state-of-the-art infrastructure, superior support services for businesses, and a living environment suited to a young and dynamic workforce.[114][115] By 2020, it was expected to present users with VDSL2+ plans capable of offering speeds reaching 150 Mbit/s, and ensure that the majority of Lebanese population would have access to a full range of services (FTTH, IPTV, video conferencing).In 2016, when residents in the capital could start dreaming of lightning-speed, fiber-optic connections, 300 villages in Keserwan, Batroun, Nabatiyeh, and the Bekaa had no access to the internet whatsoever, due to the absence of a fixed telephone network.[11] 1992: The Lebanese Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) publishes a plan for rebuilding and modernizing the telecom infrastructure in Lebanon, which is presented as one of the government's key priorities.
LebanonFranceCompagnie des Messageries ImperialesCMA-CGMUniversal Postal UnionHôtel des Postes et TélégraphesPhalangesSNC-LavalinCanada PostLibanPostNajib MikatiNabeulCompagnie Générale de Télégraphie sans FilInternational Telecommunication UnionIntelsatcoaxial cableFrance Câbles et RadioItalcableInternational Court of JusticeTony FrangiehSuleimancivil warArabsatJouret El-BalloutInvestcomGlobal System for Mobile communicationsSoneraRafic HaririRadio LibanaiseVoix du LibanMourabitounBachir GemayelWalid JumblattMix FMArmenianArabicRadio France InternationalRadio OneJamil Mardam-BeyTele-OrientTele-LibanLebanese Broadcasting CorporationMurr TVAl JadeedFuture TVOrange TVAl-ManarTélé LumièreSpeedtestInternational Telecommunication Union (ITU)Ministry of Telecommunicationssubmarine fiber-optic cablesCADMOSPentaskhinosBERYTARUGARITI-ME-WECyprus Telecommunications Authority (CYTA)EuropeInternet Service ProvidersEthernet metropolitan area networkDigital Subscriber LinesAsymmetric Digital Subscriber LinesVery-high-speed Digital Subscriber LinesWireless ISPMTC TouchSolidereBeirut Digital DistrictNicolas SehnaouiBoutrous HarbCyberiaOger TelecomOrascomTelecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA)The Daily StarFacebookSovereign statesAfghanistanArmeniaAzerbaijanBahrainBangladeshBhutanBruneiCambodiaCyprusEast Timor (Timor-Leste)GeorgiaIndonesiaIsraelJordanKazakhstanNorth KoreaSouth KoreaKuwaitKyrgyzstanMalaysiaMaldivesMongoliaMyanmarPakistanPhilippinesRussiaSaudi ArabiaSingaporeSri LankaTajikistanThailandTurkeyTurkmenistanUnited Arab EmiratesUzbekistanVietnamStates withlimited recognitionNorthern CyprusPalestineTaiwanDependenciesBritish Indian Ocean TerritoryCocos (Keeling) IslandsHong KongTelecommunicationsHistoryBroadcastingCable protection systemCable TV