The Sarcasm

Last week, the Lebanon Telecoms Ministry disabled the use of VoIP. This didn’t really come as a surprise to me.

The Lebanese government has a major stake in a plethora of telecom companies scattered across Lebanon. People are highly encouraged to buy dial-up for about $7/month, primarily because they’re forced to pay an outrageous amount in fees for the phone call made to connect. This amounts to about $0.16 per minute.

DSL prices are still extremely high. For about $200/month, you can buy a 2.3 Mbps line. They’re talking about deploying a 100 Mbps fiber line for all Lebanese residents at some point in 2011, but I’m rather skeptical. If the Ministry doesn’t reject it, the Israelis have another reason to violently set us back a few years.