The Kind Of News You Won’t Read In Lebanon

From Ghana’s main newspaper (The Graphic):

Tariff War Unfolds

The four main mobile telecommunication service providers in the country have heightened what has been referred to as ‘tariff war’, in their quest to either maintain or gain more market share.

As a result, MTN, tiGo, Vodafone and Zain have embarked on massive slashes in their call tariffs either through attractive promotional activities or directly through tariff cuts, which they claim have come to stay

In a country with a government-controlled duopoly like Lebanon, we can only dream of such a scenario. We can’t even imagine MTC touch and Alpha embarking on such market-driven competition, let alone introducing modern services like 3G or scraping stupid layers of complexity like “good” vs “bad” phone numbers.

I received an SMS last week informing me that my 3G data plan will double in speed and half in price. The Ghanaian parliament is also preparing a “number portability” bill that allows you to change your provider without losing your number, so that you won’t be locked in under one carrier. Could something like that ever happen in Lebanon?

The irony? Most of the companies mentioned above (especially MTN) are manned by Lebanese engineers and managers. It’s not like Lebanon doesn’t have the skills..