Beirut, Lebanon Oct 5, 2022: Minister of Telecom Johnny Corm held a meeting Wednesday with Alfa and touch CEOs and senior officials as part of the ongoing network performance meetings. The current network status and challenges facing the operators and ways to address them have been discussed during the meeting held at the Ministry of Telecommunications (MoT) headquarters.
Corm
Minister Corm stressed that in line with transparency and the right of the Lebanese to be updated on the network KPIs and coverage status, a notable progress has been achieved by the two operators, especially in terms of leveling up the adoption of solar energy on the mobile networks with number of sites equipped with solar growing to 237 Alfa and 235 touch sites.
Corm said that “he witnessed this progress during a tour with Alfa technical team in Beirut and suburbs where drive tests were conducted to monitor the network quality”. The Minister explained that Alfa was able to increase its network availability rate to 92.2 percent whereby the number of daily sites facing outages dropped to 146 total sites out of 1370 after solving many of the issues and external factors impacting the service such as the fuel shortages which Alfa resolved completely and is no longer facing this issue. “Work is underway to resolve the other factors impacting the network performance, and on top come thefts and electricity shortages”, the Minister explained.
Minister Corm emphasized that the objective is to stabilize data and voice performance through ensuring that all sites are supplied with fuel and power to ensure best quality for the mobile service and reach a network availability of 95 percent across Lebanon, stressing that cooperation between the operators and Ogero is inevitable.
Nassif
Alfa CEO and Chairman Jad Nassif outlined “the considerable progress achieved in Alfa’s network performance over the past two weeks, with network availability increasing to 92.2 percent compared to 88 percent previously”.
He underscored that these positive results came in line with the plan developed with Minister Corm whereby Alfa is moving closer to the set target of 95 percent network availability upon the plan completion.
Nassif stressed “that the performance improvement was witnessed across Lebanon with 70 percent of sites registering a network availability exceeding 95 percent”. Beirut network’s availability, the CEO explained, has gone beyond 80 percent and work is ongoing to bolster the service quality further in line with the plan objectives.
Nassif said: “we are constantly and daily monitoring the network performance, analyzing the data, suggesting solutions and implementing them which is manifested in the results and improvements we achieved”. He stressed that most problems are due to external factors, namely electricity shortages and site thefts.
Nassif said that “a huge progress was achieved in the implementation of the action plan where electricity supply has been strengthened in sites through round the clock supply relying on additional generator subscriptions and our own generators, security guards have been assigned to various sites, and our team has been applying technical solutions to enhance performance”. Nassif said that as a result of all these steps, our network availability is up 4 points and all our KPIs witnessed huge improvements.
