Lebanon’s Telecommunications Minister, Jamal Jarrah, has announced a plan to revamp the landline communications network in Lebanon. “As soon as the improvements are finished, 500,000 additional landline numbers will become available,” Jarrah said.
He was speaking during the project’s launch ceremony at the Grand Serail, the headquarters of the Prime Minister of Lebanon. He also announced a planned upgrade of the mobile network.
In the same speech, Jarrah promised to begin an upgrade of the country’s fibre optic networks, improve internet services and introduce new data bundles for students.
According to a report in The Daily Star, this is phase one of new a project to revamp the telecom services in Lebanon and the second phase will be to install more fibre optical networks. It is planned to start the building of the fibre optic cables from the rural areas straight to the major cities like Beirut, Jarrah said.
He said that Ogero promised to complete the installation of the new landlines in: “… a matter of weeks and not months.”
He also spoke about planned upgrades to the country’s mobile infrastructure. “At the end of February we will upgrade the internet service to 4G and at the end of March of this year this service will cover at least 85% percent of Lebanese territories,” Jarrah said. He said that users will experience ‘real 4G speeds.’
Jarrah said that these services were introduced at the request of the government and Prime Minister Saad Hariri. The administration is keen to complete the fibre optics across all of Lebanon in a short period of time, starting in rural areas and then come to the cities.
