Switch flipped, Internet still slow
The Internet floodgates are finally open for Lebanon to receive much-needed international bandwidth via an undersea fiber-optic cable. It will, however, take at least a few more weeks for consumers to see a significant difference.
“[Consumers] will not see any dramatic result until a new pricing scheme is in place,” said Habib Torbey, chairman of Globalcom Data Services, a local Internet and data service provider. Antoine Boustany, an advisor to Telecom Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui, said the new price scheme needs to be approved by cabinet, which has not yet received a vote of confidence in parliament.
Download speeds in Lebanon have been laughably slow for years because the country has not had access to a large amount of international bandwidth.
That changed Monday, when the India, Middle East and Western Europe—or IMEWE—“switch” was flipped. The IMEWE is an undersea fiber-optic cable with the capacity to transfer 3.84 Terabits of data per second, which is exponentially more than the few Gigabits of international bandwidth Lebanon had before it started using the cable. Bandwidth via this cable is also crucial for Lebanon to roll out 3G mobile phone networks, which will also offer high-speed Internet connections, expected in September.
Lebanon’s new cabinet must agree to new prices at which to sell Internet access before customers can buy the newly available high-speed connections now possible because of this additional bandwidth. The Internet market in Lebanon is liberalized—it has private Internet and data service providers like IDM, Terranet and Cyberia—but is still largely in state hands. Access to this new cable is controlled by the government, which sells access to the private sector, and sets Internet package prices for the consumer, or directly to consumers through Ogero.
Via the Ministry of Telecommunications, the state currently sells international bandwidth to the private sector at extremely high prices—some $2,700 for a 2.048 Mbps connection, compared with averages around $200 in the region and $20 in the US and Europe for the same connection, according to Khaldoun Farhat, Terranet’s CEO.
Private Internet and data service providers started purchasing more bandwidth—at the current high price—beginning Monday to fill backorders from months ago, but will not pass on high speeds to consumers until the prices they pay are lowered, members of the private sector interviewed for this article told NOW Lebanon.
Their argument is thus: To give consumers high speeds right away, they would have to charge very high prices or give fast connections at current prices, thereby losing all their profits. Negotiations between the Ministry of Telecommunications and the private sector on prices are currently underway.
“We’re pushing to have it reduced to $100, they’re saying $300,” Imad Tarabay, CEO of Cedarcom, an Internet and data service provider, told NOW Lebanon.
Boustani, Telecom Minister Sehnaoui’s advisor, told NOW Lebanon that the new price list should be agreed to, “I think, within one month.”
When the new prices are agreed, NOW Lebanon previously reported, consumers will most likely pay the same amount for connections that they pay now, but the connections will be much faster and have higher—or possibly no—limits on how much they can download each month. (For example, a $33 connection might still still cost $33, but the speed could be 1 Mbps instead of 512 Kbps with a 5 GB download limit, if there is a limit at all.)
Until then, consumers might notice a slight uptick in the speed of their current connections. When buying an Internet connection with an advertised download speed (for example, 512 Kbps), a customer does not receive a dedicated line (i.e., the customer is not guaranteed to always be able to download at 512 Kbps).
This is standard practice around the world because customers are not always using their connections to the maximum at every moment of the day. Internet and data service providers split connections among several customers so that each can potentially benefit from the advertised download speed. This is why there are some times of the day when an Internet connection will be slower or faster, depending on how many people are using the shared connection at once.
Because Lebanon’s Internet and data service providers now have more bandwidth, customers’ connections are more likely to be closer to their advertised download speeds than they currently are, all of the providers interviewed for this article said. For now, “customers may expect, let’s say, less congestion,” Torbey, of Globalcom Data Services, said.
The eight other telecom companies that built and now operate the IMEWE cable have been getting additional bandwidth from it since December 2010, a member of the IMEWE consortium told NOW Lebanon.
Boustany told NOW Lebanon that, indeed, the cable has been ready for months, “but we switched it on now because there was a misunderstanding or conflict, if you want, with the director general of Ogero.”
The arguments between the Ministry and Ogero, a state-owned company that controls the fixed-line network and Internet market, have been widely reported. Now both are taking credit for bringing bandwidth via the IMEWE. Boustany insists the ministry signed contracts abroad to bring more capacity, while a source from Ogero told NOW Lebanon, “We activated capacity on IMEWE and entered into agreements with tier-one providers [to bring Lebanon bandwidth].”
Given that an argument between Ogero and the ministry prevented Lebanon from using the IMEWE for over half a year, it remains to be seen if problems between the two will disrupt the service in the future.
http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=288989&MID=0&PID=0#ixzz1RN3DeVa3
