On March 27, 2012, H.E. Mr. Nicolas Sehnaoui, Minister of Telecommunications, visited the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK), wherein he met Rev. Fr. Hady Mahfouz, USEK President, and had a debate with the students of the Faculty of Engineering.

During his visit, Mr. Sehnaoui unveiled his plan to boost the country’s high-speed Internet capacity to 33Gbit/s as he submitted to Cabinet plans to reduce the charges of extra consumption on DSL usage. More particularly, he announced that Internet capacity had been upgraded substantially since his taking office and unveiled further plans to boost capacity by 10Gbit/s from the present 23Gbit/s.
 
“You will recall that 10 months ago the capacity was 3Gbit/s for all of Lebanon and we were able to add 10Gbit/s that we used up completely. Then we recently added 10Gbit/s and we hope to add a further 10Gbit/s in the coming weeks,” Mr. Sehnaoui stated. “Thus Lebanon will have moved from 3Gbit/s 10 months ago to 23Gbit/s at present and within a few weeks to 33Gbit/s, or 11 times as fast in a span of around a year,” he added.

Mr. Sehnaoui also indicated that he had recently submitted to the government a request for amendments to the tariff decree governing DSL. One amendment seeks to grant all DSL subscribers to Ogero – the semi-autonomous company responsible for administering telecoms in the country – unlimited nighttime usage between 12 a.m. and 7 a.m. The other amendment aims to reduce the charges on those exceeding their download quotas, or “extra consumption.”

Moreover, Mr. Sehnaoui explained that those exceeding their quotas would, if the amendment is approved, be charged for the price of 100 MB rather the 1GB, which is the pricing scheme at present. He pointed out that the upcoming Cabinet’s agenda would include an item about linking Lebanon with Cyprus through a new international cable, which could benefit Lebanon with an additional 700 Gbit/s of capacity.