Take a 10 hour flight east from Lebanon and you will findyourself in the most Internet-enabled country in the world: South Korea. Thecountry has been labeled as the most connected in the world for years now, withan average connection speed of 39 Megabits per second (with that speed, you candownload a 10 Megabyte YouTube video in less than 2 seconds). Lebanon lies atthe other end of the spectrum, ranked last among 186 countries, with an averageconnection speed of 450 kilobits per second. In comparing the Korean success story to that of Lebanon’sown failed telecommunications network, it is easy to get an idea of why theLebanese hardly progress economically and instead reminisce over pastachievements. We have heard them all before: Arabs invented the “0” andalgebra, and the Lebanese were the first to introduce GSM — the world’s mostwidely used mobile phone network — in the Middle East. Yet today they suffer
