Ливан почтасы мен телекоммуникациясының тарихы мен дамуы

Posts 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. A combination of poor services and high prices culminated in popular protests against the government's attempt, in October 2019, to tax the widely used messaging service WhatsApp. The anger this measure triggered captured a more general sense of dissatisfaction, and contributed to tipping the country into a protracted crisis. Civil unrest coincided with Lebanon's default on its ballooning debt; in the ensuing economic collapse, telecommunications have been among the infrastructure most affected.

France first established a post office (or "bureau de recette") in the port of Beirut in November 1845. It would use French stamps and was designed primarily to facilitate French trade absent an effective Ottoman postal service. Indeed, although Lebanon was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, the latter was in a state of growing disarray. Its overland postal services were notoriously slow and unreliable; moreover, the Ottoman Empire lacked any steamship capacity in the Mediterranean, and was thus incapable of effectively connecting coastal cities in its own empire, not to mention beyond. 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. On 4 October 1851, the French government allocated the concession to a state run company, which was incorporated the following year as the Compagnie des Services Maritimes des Messageries Nationales. The latter changed names on various occasions over the years, but retains a presence in Lebanon to this day: What was known as of 1853 as the Compagnie des Messageries Imperiales was renamed in 1871 Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, which ultimately would become, in 1996, part of CMA CGM, which is still the main shipping operator in the port of Beirut. The Ottoman Empire's technological disadvantage created space for empires other than France. Back in 1845, Austria may in fact have set up the first foreign post office in Beirut, although the exact date is unconfirmed. Russia inaugurated its own in 1857, Britain in 1873, and Germany in 1900. Although imperial attention focused on Beirut, France opened in Tripoli a second post office in September 1852, followed by Austria and Russia. French posts resumed in 1918, first as a military service before being extended to civilians. France, as a mandatory power, formed on 1 January 1921 an "Inspection Generale des Postes et Telegraphes" covering both Lebanon and Syria, before the two countries enjoyed their own separate postal administrations in 1924. Lebanon continued to use French stamps, overprinted "Grand Liban" and soon "Republique Libanaise". Arabic was introduced in 1928. As of 1929, a weekly airmail service connected Beirut to France's Mediterranean city of Marseille, via Greece and Italy. With Lebanon's independence in 1943, telecommunications fell under a ministry of posts and telegraphs (which in the 1950s would become the ministry of posts, telegraphs, and telephones, and in 1980 the ministry of posts and telecommunications). In 1983, Israeli forces did as much in occupied Saida, setting up postal services for the benefit of their troops, but which were also accessible to Lebanese citizens. In a sense, these developments echoed the country's not so distant history. Beirut main post office, which was heavily damaged during the fighting, was renovated in 1996. The Lebanese government then privatized its postal services through a "build operate transfer" scheme, or BOT. The bid, launched in October 1998, was won by the Canadian investment company SNC Lavalin, which in partnership with Canada Post operated Lebanese postal services through the company registered as LibanPost. In 2001, arguing that they were losing money, its Canadian investors sold LibanPost to Lebanon Invest (which later merged with the Audi investment bank). It belongs since 2011 or 2012 to the groups M1, co founded by Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati, and Saradar, which enjoys close ties to Audi.

Beirut's first telegraphic lines connected it to Damascus in 1861 and to Istanbul two years later. Lebanon's first submarine, telegraphic cable was laid in 1938 by France, as it prepared for war, and connected Beirut to Nabeul in Tunisia. After the war, it was operated by Radio Orient (see below). Teleprinters, which could turn telegraphic communications into text, started operating in May 1954.

The first mention of a telephone network in Lebanon (then known as Syria) dates from 1910 and, surprisingly, concerns the secondary town of Zahle in Mount Lebanon, which was also applying at the time for a concession to set up an electric plant—another first in this part of the region. 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. In December 1921, the French mandate authorities granted the concession for radio electric communication to the Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie sans Fil (CSF), authorized to build in Khalde a radio electric transmission station connected to Radio France. The following year, in December 1922, the CSF established Radio Orient to run said concession in Lebanon and Syria. Lebanon became a member state of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 1924, as France proceeded to separate the two countries from one another.

Starting in the 1950s, an economically affluent Lebanon started investing in developing its telephone network by installing automatic exchanges, not least in partnership with Ericsson, which assumed a key role in the following decades. (Ericsson had long been a pioneer in telecommunications in the Arab world, setting up the first telephone lines in Istanbul and Cairo in the 1890s.) In May 1954, the telephone system was modernized with the introduction of the automatic dialing system. Around that time, Lebanon counted just over 27,000 telephones, massively concentrated in its capital city, Beirut. At the end of the 1960s, Lebanon was planning to extend the telephone network to all rural regions across the country. Meanwhile, Lebanon pioneered the Telex system in the Arab world, introducing it in 1962. In 1969, Lebanon set up in Arbaniyeh its first satellite earth station, capable of handling voice conversations as well as television channels. This sign of progress was celebrated by the creation of a dedicated stamp issued on 25 March 1971. Lebanon's first submarine coaxial cable, to France's Marseille, was inaugurated in 1970. 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%). An interesting player during these years is the French company Radio Orient, which continued to assume a central position in the telephone sector even after Lebanon's independence. It hosted the first international telephone services in Lebanon, in 1952, and the first Telex services, ten years later. Most importantly, the firm retained its exclusive concession over radio electric communications with Europe and North America. It was only nationalized belatedly, in 1972: The new public entity, the Organisme de Gestion et d'Exploitation de Radio Orient, which would later be known as Ogero, then inherited Radio Orient's de facto monopoly. Intense investments, during this era, did not go without suspicions of foul play, coming from Lebanese who were dissatisfied with the pace at which the country's telephone network was developing. 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.

The civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990 saw a back and forth movement between further progress and regression. In 1976, Lebanon was a founding member of Arabsat, an intergovernmental organization delivering satellite connections to Arab states. The 1982 Israeli invasion in itself caused destruction, but also set back a U. S. funded, $325 million plan to repair earlier damage. The two Intelsat stations Lebanon was running in Arbaniyeh were destroyed on 7 May 1983, and remained out of commission in following years. although it also seems to have been destroyed. By the end of the war, Lebanon had only an estimated 150,000 telephone lines (down from 450,000), which were unreliable. The conflict had also ushered in a plethora of informal providers who set up telephone networks using local and international lines illegally. They became so much part of the local landscape that they acquired the nickname of "centrales", which served Lebanese citizens as public payphones. Clandestine satellite terminals also flourished; future prime minister Najib Mikati was renowned to be particularly active in this field.

After the war ended, the telephone system was rebuilt and revamped. Investcom, a subsidiary of the Mikati Group, launched in 1991 the first Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS). The same year, Sodetel acquired a monopoly on switching within the network, through its subsidiary Libanpac. and enabled the country to upgrade its telephone switching systems from an aging analogue technology to digital. the Saudi Almabani (20%), and more anonymous Lebanese entities and investors (66%). The World Telecommunication Development Report estimated that, by 1996, Lebanon had 200,000 cellular users already, more than any other Arab state. Two years later, they were more than 350,000. By 2009, there were 1,816,262 landlines along with 4,890,534 mobile telephones in use in Lebanon, a relatively high penetration rate for both fixed lines and mobiles.

Radio Orient, which started broadcasting in 1938, was the second radio to do so in the Arab world, after Cairo. In April 1946, three years after Lebanon's independence, it became Radio Libanaise: Attached to the Ministry of News and Tourism, it was the country's first radio channel, later known as Radio Liban. In January 1958, it moved from the government's seat, at the Serail, to a new building in Senayeh, 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. The sector was, at the time, tightly controlled by the state, notably through decree 74 of 1953, which made licensing difficult to achieve and prohibitively expensive. By 1969, there were two licensed radio stations in Beirut, one broadcasting in Arabic and the other in French. Voix du Liban indeed resumed its activities with the start of hostilities in 1975. The same year, the Sunni faction Mourabitoun launched the Voice of Arab Lebanon. Radio Libre Liban followed in 1978, at the initiative of former president Bachir Gemayel. By 1984, each political organ had acquired a household name: radio Bachir, radio Phalanges, radio Etat (for Radio Liban), radio Walid (in reference to Druze leader Walid Jumblatt), radio Suleiman (Frangieh), etc. At the end of the war, in 1990, some 180 stations were emitting illegally in various parts of the country. An estimated 35 radio stations were active in 2018, of which 20 focused on politics while the others, such as Mix FM, offered entertainment only. Radio Liban continued to run one FM station, which shifted between French, English, and Armenian, and the sole AM radio station, broadcasting solely in Arabic. Radio Lebanon also relays Radio France International at 13:00 (UTC) daily. Among the casualties of Lebanon's post 2019 economic breakdown features Radio One, one of the most popular entertainment channels.

Television broadcasting kicked off in Lebanon as a commercial enterprise from the start, initiated by businessmen Wissam Ezzedine and Joe Arida. On 9 April 1956, they signed an agreement with the government to establish the Compagnie Libanaise de Télévision (CLT). Board members included scions of some of the country's most prominent families, notably Naji Pharaon and Gaby Jabre. Capital came mostly from Syrian investors, namely Jamil Mardam Bey and Rafik Said. The latter was the Middle East representative for the French Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie sans Fil (CSF), which provided the equipment. The station's first stone was laid in November 1957 in Tallet al Khayyat, on a plot of land sold by the French embassy. Its first programs were launched on 28 May 1959. Competition came in the form of Tele Orient, incorporated in 1960 as the Compagnie de Télévision du Liban et du Proche Orient. Its shareholders were Lebanese bankers: Emile Boustany (Banque de l'Industrie et du Travail), Jean and Elie Abou Jaoud (Banque Libanaise pour le Commerce), and Toufic Assaf (Banque de Beyrouth et des Pays Arabes). Its official launch took place on 6 May 1962. 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. Between 1988 and 1994, Tele Liban's shares were traded by various parties, notably Rafic Hariri, who in the early 1990s bought all privately owned shares. 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. By the end of February 2001, Tele Liban, which for years had been on the brink of bankruptcy, was shut down. although the application of the audiovisual law has caused the closure of a number of TV stations. Some of the most important television networks are the LBC, Murr TV, Al Jadeed, Future TV, Orange TV (OTV), Al Manar, NBN, and Télé Lumière. 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. Digitek likewise appears to have disappears. In 2019, CableVision absorbed Econet, creating a monopoly on legal cable television. CableVision was rumored to be owned by GroupMed, the Hariri family holding, However, the sector remains largely informal, with a plethora of unlicensed providers dominating the market. On 1 February 2019. Lebanon ranked 161 on Net Index, which rated internet speeds worldwide and has since been replaced by Speedtest. On 23 November 2021, Speedtest ranked Lebanon 160 for broadband and 82 for mobile services. The country has shown a high internet penetration rate nonetheless. The number of Internet users was reported at 78.2% as of January 2021. 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. Characteristically, these numbers conflict with other sources, making them difficult to validate. +Internet users (% of population)Year%Source20016.8Lebanese Broadcasting International200718.7Ministry of Telecommunications200822.5Ministry of Telecommunications201152.0Presidency of the Council of Ministers202178.2Data Reportal
Internet services are administered in Lebanon by the Ministry of Telecommunications and the state owned company Ogero. The easiest way to understand the country's internet is start at the source, which in Lebanon is primarily submarine cables, and move outward toward end users, which have accessed the internet through increasingly efficient technologies.

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. The three main landing points of these cables, called international exchanges or gateways, are all operated by Ogero. They are in Ras Beirut, Jdeideh, and Tripoli. Lebanon's international fiber optic cables form two parallel systems. CADMOS, which started operating in September 1995, is a 230 km cable connecting landing points in Ras Beirut and Jdeideh to Pentaskhinos in Cyprus, and owned by a consortium including the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications. It reportedly had a capacity as low as 622 Mbit/s. It is interlinked with BERYTAR, which started operating in April 1997. This 134 km cable connects Lebanese landing points (in Saida, Ras Beirut, and Tripoli) with Tartous in Syria. It is owned jointly by the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications and the Syrian Establishment for Telecommunications, and officially had a capacity of 5 Gbit/s, although in 2010 Lebanon's international bandwidth was reported to be less than half of that. The Tartous landing point then connects to Pentaskhinos via the UGARIT cable (1995) and to Egypt's Alexandria via the Aletar cable (1997), which has now been replaced by Alexandros (2013). I ME WE, which started operating in December 2010, is a 12,000 km cable with an overall capacity approaching 4 Tbit/s, and connecting Southern Asia with Southern Europe via the Red Sea. It is owned by a large consortium including the Lebanese operator Ogero. Its landing point in Lebanon is Tripoli, which links via I ME WE to Alexandria, Catania in the Italian island of Sicily, and Marseille on the French coast. When the project was launched, Lebanon was expecting to derive from it around 40 Gbit/s, multiplying its international capacity by 20. In 2011, Global Information Society Watch estimated in its annual country report that Lebanon had access to 120 Gbit/s via I ME WE. 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. This dependence is all the more acute that the other system is aging, a problem that Lebanese authorities have long been aware of. In 2011, an official at the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications confirmed that CADMOS would be replaced with a new cable dubbed EUROPA, which would bridge to Alexandros. This project involved a partnership with the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CYTA), with which an MoU was signed in 2013. EUROPA was still imminent as the decade came to a close: In June 2019, the Ministry of Telecommunications again announced plans for a new Internet submarine cable to link the country to Europe, to boost the Internet service locally, and to turn Lebanon into a hub for Internet distribution to countries in the region. Lebanon's efforts to increase its international bandwidth are reflected in the figures local authorities have reported over the years to the International Telecommunication Union or ITU. The leap in capacity enabled by I ME WE in 2011 appears clearly in the data. However, the claims made in subsequent years are sufficiently inconsistent to warrant verification. Indeed, the Ministry of Telecommunications has published data in its official documents that contradicts the information it submitted in parallel to the ITU. For example, in its "Daring progress" vision of 2015, the Ministry put the country's international bandwidth in 2012 and 2013 at 12.2 and 26.8 Gbit/s respectively. +International bandwidth (Gbps)YearBandwidthSource20070.93Ministry of Postal Services and Telecommunications20091.82Ministry of Telecommunications20102.5Telecommunications Regulatory Authority201112.5Ministry of Telecommunications201252.5Ministry of Telecommunications201352.5Ministry of Telecommunications201489Ogero2015153Ministry of Telecommunications201685Ministry of Telecommunications2017130Ministry of Telecommunications2018190Ministry of Telecommunications2019220Ministry of Telecommunications2020320Ministry of Telecommunications
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.

Through its network of central offices, the state owned company Ogero provides the "backbone" telecommunication infrastructure which distributes internet capacity throughout the country. The actual distribution occurs via Data Service Providers (DSPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Ogero also doubles up as an ISP. In 1996, as postwar reconstruction was still in full swing. Lebanon started laying into the ground its core fiber optic network, starting in Beirut. In 2001, Ericsson laid approximately 2000 km of fiber optic cables to create a high speed backbone network. Its design included two super rings and 30 sub rings representing 4,400 km of cables. The need for a more robust backbone had been made more salient by disruptions incurred during the 2006 war with Israel. The up haul was officially completed in April 2013. However, two years later, in April 2015, only one sub ring had actually been turned on. By 2017, fiber optic cables finally connected approximately 300 central offices, from which the internet could reach end users over traditional copper cables.

The very first internet services were pioneered by the American University in Beirut, which started in 1991 to set up the first internet node in the country. What was known as AUBnet became active in 1993. The network was then expanded to encompass other institutions, within the Lebanese Academic and Research Network (LARN), built around AUBnet as its main node. By 1995, Lebanon was officially connected to the internet, at which point dial up internet was introduced as a commercial service. The first firm on the market, Compuserve, would charge subscribers $60 per hour. In 1996, 14 kbit/s dial up services cost around $75 a month for a 15 hour plan. By 2005, it claimed to cover 95% of the country, an assertion that seemed wildly exaggerated.

Although Lebanon had been the first Arab state to introduce the internet, it was among the last, in 2006, to provide Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL), which enable users to transmit digital data over regular telephone lines. Faster technologies followed suit: Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines (ADSL) were offered for the first time in April 2007, and were partially upgraded High bit rate Digital Subscriber Lines (HDSL) in 2009. Ogero central offices have long suffered from a weak capacity to provide satisfying internet services to end users. For example, in 2015, only 78 such centrals were equipped with Very high speed Digital Subscriber Lines (VDSL). Another break on internet access was poor cooperation between providers. 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. Poorer or remote areas were inevitably at a disadvantage, and enticed to resort to illegal providers. Even where the law did spell things out, enforcement was lax. For instance, service providers were compelled, per the 2002 law, to establish interconnections to speed up the exchange of data between users on their respective networks. But when the Beirut Internet Exchange was created in this spirit, setting a positive precedent, Ogero refused to join.

Since its inception, Lebanon's telecommunications systems have serviced certain areas far better than others. The notion of universal service, which stands for equal access to telecommunications, was introduced conceptually in 2008 but never followed through. 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. Mobile phone outages were frequent in remote areas, not least due to power cuts. The outbreak of Lebanon's economic crisis, in 2019, only reinforced the sector's preexisting traits. Telecommunication services soon started fraying in peripheral areas. By mid 2020, disruptions were sufficiently frequent and widespread for a local NGO, SMEX, to attempt to map them systematically. January 2021 saw major outages in Nabatiyeh and Aley. The even extended to central neighborhoods of Beirut, although this appeared to be at least in part a negotiations tactic of Ogero, in negotiating more resources from the government.