Postal services and telecommunications have long played an essential role in Lebanon, a small country with an expansive diaspora, a vivid media landscape, and an economy geared toward trade and banking. The sector's history has nonetheless been chaotic, marked by conflict but also, and perhaps most importantly, a deeply rooted legacy of state control, weak competition, and intense politicization. A combination of poor services and high prices culminated in popular protests against the government's attempt, in October 2019, to tax the widely used messaging service WhatsApp. The anger this measure triggered captured a more general sense of dissatisfaction, and contributed to tipping the country into a protracted crisis. Civil unrest coincided with Lebanon's default on its ballooning debt; in the ensuing economic collapse, telecommunications have been among the infrastructure most affected.
Postal services
France first established a post office (or "bureau de recette") in the port of Beirut in November 1845. It would use French stamps and was designed primarily to facilitate French trade absent an effective Ottoman postal service. Indeed, although Lebanon was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, the latter was in a state of growing disarray. Its overland postal services were notoriously slow and unreliable; moreover, the Ottoman Empire lacked any steamship capacity in the Mediterranean, and was thus incapable of effectively connecting coastal cities in its own empire, not to mention beyond.
By contrast, French postal services could rely on the private shipping company Paquebots de la Mediterrannee, which ran a steamship line between Marseille, Alexandria, and Beirut three times a month. On 4 October 1851, the French government allocated the concession to a state-run company, which was incorporated the following year as the Compagnie des Services Maritimes des Messageries Nationales. The latter changed names on various occasions over the years, but retains a presence in Lebanon to this day: What was known as of 1853 as the Compagnie des Messageries Imperiales was renamed in 1871 Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, which ultimately would become, in 1996, part of CMA-CGM, which is still the main shipping operator in the port of Beirut.
The Ottoman Empire's technological disadvantage created space for empires other than France. Back in 1845, Austria may in fact have set up the first foreign post office in Beirut, although the exact date is unconfirmed. Russia inaugurated its own in 1857, Britain in 1873, and Germany in 1900. Although imperial attention focused on Beirut, France opened in Tripoli a second post office in September 1852, followed by Austria and Russia. Ottoman authorities repeatedly petitioned against this encroachment on its sovereignty, and attempted to improve their own postal services to compete, but to no avail. On the contrary, foreign networks continued to expand their coverage and range of services, notably through money transfers. In the late 19th century, French post offices liaised between Lebanon's expanding diaspora in the Americas and the homeland, going as far as to collect and deliver mail directly in villages as of 1906. Such activities came to halt in 1914, when all foreign posts were closed in the context of the world war.
French posts resumed in 1918, first as a military service before being extended to civilians. France, as a mandatory power, formed on 1 January 1921 an "Inspection Generale des Postes et Telegraphes" covering both Lebanon and Syria, before the two countries enjoyed their own separate postal administrations in 1924. Lebanon continued to use French stamps, overprinted "Grand Liban" and soon "Republique Libanaise". Arabic was introduced in 1928. As of 1929, a weekly airmail service connected Beirut to France's Mediterranean city of Marseille, via Greece and Italy.
With Lebanon's independence in 1943, telecommunications fell under a ministry of posts and telegraphs (which in the 1950s would become the ministry of posts, telegraphs, and telephones, and in 1980 the ministry of posts and telecommunications). The now independent Lebanon joined the Universal Postal Union in 1945. In 1946, an architectural competition was held to design a spectacular "Hôtel des Postes et Télégraphes", which remains a highlight of downtown Beirut.
During the civil war that consumed Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, various factions established their own postal services, notably the Christian Phalanges as soon as 1975. In 1983, Israeli forces did as much in occupied Saida, setting up postal services for the benefit of their troops, but which were also accessible to Lebanese citizens. In a sense, these developments echoed the country's not-so-distant history.
Beirut main post office, which was heavily damaged during the fighting, was renovated in 1996. The Lebanese government then privatized its postal services through a "build-operate-transfer" scheme, or BOT. The bid, launched in October 1998, was won by the Canadian investment company SNC-Lavalin, which in partnership with Canada Post operated Lebanese postal services through the company registered as LibanPost. In 2001, arguing that they were losing money, its Canadian investors sold LibanPost to Lebanon Invest (which later merged with the Audi investment bank). It belongs since 2011 or 2012 to the groups M1, co-founded by Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati, and Saradar, which enjoys close ties to Audi.
Telegraph Beirut's first telegraphic lines connected it to Damascus in 1861 and to Istanbul two years later.
Lebanon's first submarine, telegraphic cable was laid in 1938 by France, as it prepared for war, and connected Beirut to Nabeul in Tunisia. After the war, it was operated by Radio-Orient (see below).
Teleprinters, which could turn telegraphic communications into text, started operating in May 1954.
Telephone The first mention of a telephone network in Lebanon (then known as Syria) dates from 1910 and, surprisingly, concerns the secondary town of Zahle in Mount Lebanon, which was also applying at the time for a concession to set up an electric plant—another first in this part of the region. Writing in 1914, the Daily Consular and Trade Reports of the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor announced that the government of Lebanon was making plans to connect its seat in Baabda, above Beirut, to major cities across the country, thanks to a 150 miles of cables on metal posts. In December 1921, the French mandate authorities granted the concession for radio-electric communication to the Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie sans Fil (CSF), authorized to build in Khalde a radio-electric transmission station connected to Radio France. The following year, in December 1922, the CSF established Radio-Orient to run said concession in Lebanon and Syria. Lebanon became a member state of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 1924, as France proceeded to separate the two countries from one another.
The prewar boom Starting in the 1950s, an economically affluent Lebanon started investing in developing its telephone network by installing automatic exchanges, not least in partnership with Ericsson, which assumed a key role in the following decades. (Ericsson had long been a pioneer in telecommunications in the Arab world, setting up the first telephone lines in Istanbul and Cairo in the 1890s.) In May 1954, the telephone system was modernized with the introduction of the automatic dialing system. Around that time, Lebanon counted just over 27,000 telephones, massively concentrated in its capital city, Beirut. By 1957, demand for telephone services outpaced supply, as seen in the contracts signed with Ericsson, to expand the network with 25,000 new lines in the country's main cities, and with Siemens, to build a state-of-the-art radio transmission station. At the end of the 1960s, Lebanon was planning to extend the telephone network to all rural regions across the country. Meanwhile, Lebanon pioneered the Telex system in the Arab world, introducing it in 1962. In 1969, Lebanon set up in Arbaniyeh its first satellite earth station, capable of handling voice conversations as well as television channels. It thus joined the global, American-led Intelsat network. This sign of progress was celebrated by the creation of a dedicated stamp issued on 25 March 1971.
Lebanon's first submarine coaxial cable, to France's Marseille, was inaugurated in 1970. Its operation and maintenance was handed over to Sodetel, a company specifically established in 1968 for the purpose of managing this cable, and co-owned by the Lebanese government (50%), France Câbles et Radio (40%) and Italcable (10%). In May 1971, a contract was awarded to connect Beirut to Egypt's Alexandria, via another submarine coaxial cable, and to Damascus via land cable and microwave transmission.
An interesting player during these years is the French company Radio-Orient, which continued to assume a central position in the telephone sector even after Lebanon's independence. It hosted the first international telephone services in Lebanon, in 1952, and the first Telex services, ten years later. Most importantly, the firm retained its exclusive concession over radio-electric communications with Europe and North-America. Lebanon's attempt to tax the company in 1956 led the French government to initiate a lawsuit in its defense at the International Court of Justice. It was only nationalized belatedly, in 1972: The new public entity, the Organisme de Gestion et d'Exploitation de Radio Orient, which would later be known as Ogero, then inherited Radio-Orient's de facto monopoly.
Intense investments, during this era, did not go without suspicions of foul-play, coming from Lebanese who were dissatisfied with the pace at which the country's telephone network was developing. One notable target for criticism was Tony Frangieh, who in the early 1970s was appointed Minister of Posts and Telecommunications in a government presided by his own father Suleiman.
The civil war's legacy The civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990 saw a back-and-forth movement between further progress and regression. In 1976, Lebanon was a founding member of Arabsat, an intergovernmental organization delivering satellite connections to Arab states. The 1982 Israeli invasion in itself caused destruction, but also set back a U.S.-funded, $325 million plan to repair earlier damage. The two Intelsat stations Lebanon was running in Arbaniyeh were destroyed on 7 May 1983, and remained out of commission in following years. The U.S. and South Korea financed the rehabilitation of some telephone lines in 1983 and 1984. A second Intelsat satellite earth station was set up in Jouret El-Ballout in 1987, although it also seems to have been destroyed. By the end of the war, Lebanon had only an estimated 150,000 telephone lines (down from 450,000), which were unreliable.
The conflict had also ushered in a plethora of informal providers who set up telephone networks using local and international lines illegally. They became so much part of the local landscape that they acquired the nickname of "centrales", which served Lebanese citizens as public payphones. Clandestine satellite terminals also flourished; future prime minister Najib Mikati was renowned to be particularly active in this field. Meanwhile, many subscribers to the official network stopped paying their bills, in a splintering country where centralized administrations could hardly chase users anyway.
The postwar boom