wiredinUSA September 2012

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wiredInUSA - September 2012 wiredInUSA - September 2012
During July, Lebanon suffered three days
with only patchy Internet connectivity
after acrucial fiber opticcablewas severed,
30 miles off the coast of Egypt. Telecoms
Minister Nicholas Sehnaoui posted on his
Twitter account that nearby Cyprus had
agreed to reroute traffic until the cable was
repaired. “This will increase the speed back
to normal all over Lebanon,” he said.
However, Internet in the capital Beirut
remained slow, or not working at all,
hampering businesses that are already
suffering in some places because of the
threat of a spillover from the conflict in Syria.
“It is like running an engine at less than full
power. A three-day outage for Lebanon
is like losing 10 percent of the country’s
monthly productivity, especially for a
service-based economy,” said Khaldoun
Farhat, CEO of private Internet provider
Terranet. He says Lebanon is in dire need of
a backup cable.
Lebanon’s entrepreneurs are known to
persevere, even during the depths of war,
but its slow and costly Internet service has
been embarrassing. Ookla, a company that
tests Internet speeds around the world, has
often ranked Lebanon last on its global Net
Index, and the country has generally been
lower down than many less developed
nations such as Afghanistan and Burkina
Faso.
Many blame Internet problems on a policy
which allocates 80 percent of the market to
the state-owned landline provider Ogero,
pushing out private companies. The state
monopoly is a significant financier for the
treasury, critics say.
35 ASIA / AFRICA NEWS
ASIA &AFRICA
NEWS
Picture : Alessandro Paiva
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