And in Lebanon, a mobile phone boycott

It is hardly a case of erecting barricades, and it certainly is not a revolution, but Thursday’s civil boycott of mobile telephone usage to express a collective thumbs down at the outrageously high cost of mobile services in Lebanon is an important first step in the process of the citizenry getting a firmer grip on their lives…

Those who profit from the two cellular networks, LibanCell and Cellis, should consider the following: In Syria, subscribing to cellular telephony costs $11.70 monthly; in the UAE it is $5.50. In Lebanon, it is a wallet-crushing $37.50. Subscriber call costs in Syria are $0.13 per minute; in Lebanon, it is $0.24. In the hi-tech Emirates, the rate is only $0.078 per minute…

In most countries of the world mobile calls are charged by the second — but no, not in Lebanon. Here, any fraction of a minute is charged as a full minute: mobile users who hang up and then see that their call time crept over a minute by a single second can be seen weeping everywhere on the streets of Beirut. This has to end.

Excerpted from an editorial in Lebanon’s ‘The Daily Star’, July 16