Dear Ms. X

We in Lebanon love to complain about traffic. But when we tire of bemoaning our clogged roads, we often move on to another popular gripe: the poor state of the country’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure. Internet speed is slow, mobile data connections come and go as you move, and calls drop with annoying frequency. While both the current and former telecoms ministers have promised jumps in internet download speed, the country’s speed ranking embarrassingly fluctuates near 170 out of 196 countries whose internet speeds are tracked by the Ookla Netindex. That’s better than dead last — as was the case in October 2011 — but still not the lightning speeds that will usher in the billions in economic activity that we were promised. Given the fact that successive telecoms ministers have touted the goal of creating a ‘knowledge economy’, Executive set out to examine the actual state of