Lebanon's telecom operators have a history plagued with corruption.

With over 656,000 Internet users in Lebanon, the demand for a quality high speed service is evident.

GlobalCom Data Services (GDS) was awarded exclusive rights to licensed data lines in Lebanon in 1997, and so happens to be owned by a close relative of President Emile Lahoud. Legal residential Broadband Internet was not available in Lebanon until 2004. As with most monopolies, if you sign up for high speed Internet service in Lebanon, you can count on GDS being there to take their cut.

More significantly, since GDS has taken control from 1997 till today, Lebanon has gone from one of the leading Arab countries using the Internet, to having the weakest Internet infrastructure in the Arab world.

Ya Libnan investigated the viability of the current Broadband offering in Lebanon by signing up for the service. The process was long and painful, and it all starts out by calling your local ISP and requesting the service. Because of the monopoly that GDS has over Lebanon's market, they are the first to get involved by deploying a fixed point wireless connection from a central hub to the roof of your building.

It took several weeks for GDS to process the initial request. Once connected, a local licensed GDS reseller was then commissioned to connect the wireless router on the roof to your office or home via CAT5 cable. Another week or so passed waiting for the reseller to do his part.

Finally the "licensed" infrastructure was in place, and $200 later, the local Internet Service Provider (ISP) is brought in to provide connectivity to the Internet. At this juncture you are finally given a choice of service, rather than being forced to use the government selected monopoly.

The three major ISPs in Lebanon are Cyberia, IDM and Terranet. They all charge the same amount for the Broadband service, and an additional $75 to set up initially, however the biggest surprise was yet to come.

In Lebanon, Broadband starts at a measly 128k, or 16 Kilobytes per second, less than twice the speed of dial up. The next tier is 256k and the highest level of service is 512k. The ISPs charge $45, $100 and $175 respectively per month. 128k is not considered Broadband by even the lowest of standards, so I elected to go for the 256k service at $100 per month.

A month after initially requested, and $375 later ($275 to set up + $100 for the first month), the service was up and running. 256k service means 32 Kilobytes of data can be uploaded per second, granted that may be optimal. However part of the service agreement was a statement that the service would never drop below 128k.

The anticipation of being able to browse the web faster was building up. I was hoping that the overpriced and overcomplicated process I had just been through would be worth it in the end.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. The download speed was dismal. While I signed up for 256k, the fastest connection realized was 90k. The worst was yet to come.

The upload speed was actually slower than dial up. Using analysis tools, I clocked the upload speed at 10k! That is the equivalent of just over 1 Kilobyte per second.

I could not believe how poor the service was, it was time to get technical support on the phone. This is where things get interesting, since I had to deal with three independent companies in setting up the service, as expected no one was willing to take responsibility for the dismal performance. I called the ISP, and they told me it was GDS's problem. I called GDS, they blamed the ISP.

The ISP actually recommended using a "download accelerator" to attain the advertised speeds, at which point I explained to the support analyst how ridiculous that was. That is the equivalent of Mercedes advertising a car with 200 horsepower, but telling you after you buy it to use a fuel additive to achieve the full power.

Digging deeper, I uncovered the reason for the anemic upload speed. The former Minister of Telecommunications, Issam Naaman, decided to ban Voice over IP (VoIP) services in Lebanon. At the time, this meant banning services such as Net2Phone via proxy black list. Since then VoIP services have multiplied, and the paranoid Ministry of Telecommunications failed to progress. In fear of losing revenue on international calls to discount VoIP offerings, the Ministry clamped down on the ISPs by mandating a 32k maximum upload speed for residential broadband service.

32k is significant, since it is below the threshold required for a functional VoIP service. More importantly, 32k is slower than the ancient dial up service, so whether you plan to use VoIP or not, everyone will suffer.

Effectively, the Lebanese have been held back time and time again over the years because of the fear of loss of revenue. While Broadband was booming in many parts of the world, we were stuck on dial up service. The reason: the phone company (Ogero) was fat and happy from the truck loads of cash resulting from dial up telephone usage. Heavy users pay hundreds of dollars a month to the phone company because of their Internet usage. Moving to a Broadband solution would mean progressing from paying for Internet per minute to a flat rate per month.

After such a dysfunctional experience, I demanded a refund for the $275 installation fee. I did not plan on renewing the service, and the performance was well below what was advertised. GDS refused to issue a refund, as did the local reseller. No reputable company would ever scam its customers to such an extent.

There is light at the end of the tunnel however. ADSL has been talked about for a long time in Lebanon, and this week Ogero announced that it plans to launch ADSL service in 2006. We can only hope that the service will not be as poor and expensive as the current "Broadband" offering.

Source: Ya Libnan