BEIRUT: Mahmoud Haidar, consultant to Telecommunications Minister Charbel Nahhas, said Wednesday that the quality of internet services will witness a great improve in Lebanon following the launching of the India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) submarine cable by early next year.
“Once IMEWE begins functioning the quality of services will automatically improve. Logically, prices should also drop but we cannot guarantee lower cost of services because such a decision is in the hands of the government,” Haidar told The Daily Star.
Haidar’s remarks came at a conference at the Telecommunications Ministry to mark the launch of new network cables between Lebanon and Syria.
The conference, held in the presence of Nahhas and his Syrian counterpart Imad al-Sabouni, announced the launching of IMEWE, the upgrading of Cadmos-Ugarit-Berytar cable systems, the establishment of Jeddah-Amman-Damascus-Beirut-Istanbul cable systems and the construction of a regional cables system linking eastern countries.
IMEWE is a 13,000-kilometer submarine communications cable system between India and France. The design capacity is 3.84 terabits per second. It has cable landing stations at Mumbai (India) (two landing sites), Karachi (Pakistan), Fujairah (UAE), Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Suez (Egypt), Alexandria (Egypt), Tripoli (Lebanon), Catania (Italy) and Marseille (France).
Haidar said that the IMEWE cost Lebanon $45 million but added that the cost of some of the other cables systems is either confidential or under study and not clear yet.
“The most important project announced during the conference is the attempt to include Lebanon in the cable systems linking Jeddah-Amman-Damascus and Istanbul (JADI),” said president of the Professional Computer Association of Lebanon Gabriel Deek.
He added that this additional cable system will allow Lebanon to have a backup in case any of its maritime or ground cables stopped working.
“This will also allow us to exchange bandwidth with these countries,” Deek told The Daily Star on the sidelines of the conference.
According to a study prepared by the Telecommunications Ministry, JADI cable project offers a supply of 10GB internet capacity distributed to all involved countries which will start to be available at the end of 2011. It stated that the upgrading of Cadmos-Ugarit-Berytar cable systems will be finished during February 2011 and will add 10GB to the already available capacity.
Deek urged the Telecommunications Ministry to start providing entrepreneurs and citizens in Lebanon with unlimited broadband connections to improve investment flows in the country.
“The ministry is able to provide Lebanese individuals and companies with unlimited broadband connections starting today because the India-Middle East-Western Europe submarine cable is already in place and it has the ability to supply Lebanon with 120GB of broadband capacity,” he said.
“The cable is already in place but we were waiting for Egypt to open the bandwidth transfer and we will be hopefully launching IMEWE during December, so we are expecting to see improvements in connections starting January or February 2011,” he said.
Deek added that Lebanon’s broadband usage does not exceed 2.5GB in addition to another 2.5GB of illegal usage. “Lebanon’s consumption of broadband is very minimal compared to what the IMEWE offers,” he said. “It will allow Lebanese individuals and companies to benefit from new and low cost services similar to those offered in other countries.”
He said that the Telecommunications Ministry has all the means to improve connectivity in Lebanon but it is not doing so because its first aim is to balance between demand and revenues. “The ministry must be aware of the fact that providing people with more bandwidth will increase the revenues and not the contrary because the number of subscribers will go up,” he said.
Deek believes that Lebanon’s internet services must be similar to those offered by other countries in the region in order to be able to attract investments and encourage foreign companies to establish their businesses in the country. He gave the example of Egypt, saying that 8MB of DSL connection costs $100 only while in Lebanon the price of 1MB is $200.
Nahhas gave a speech during the conference in which he said that many of Lebanon’s telecommunications experts were currently working in and running companies elsewhere in the region, while the country was attempting to outsource its telecommunications management to the same companies where its own citizens were working. “Therefore we have neither marketing nor technical capacities accumulating in our own companies in Lebanon.”
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=3&article_id=121829#axzz16FIPSZPL