$100 million to develop fiber optic network in Lebanon

The Council of Ministers has approved an advance of LL150 billion ($100 million) from the Treasury to Ogero.

The funding will be used to finance part of the fiber optic project, whose overall cost totals $300 million.

Minister of Telecommunications Jamal Jarrah said last month that the ministry plans to start the fiber optic project in the next few weeks. The project aims to boost Internet speed to at least 50 megabits across the country, he said.

Early in September, the Ministry of Telecom signed a memorandum of understanding with the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (Cyta) to increase Lebanon’s share of the submarine cable Alexandros from 310 to 1,920 gigabytes per second (GB/s). Boosting the capacity of this telecom cable, which links Lebanon to France through Cyprus, allows local users to access international servers at high speed.