News

Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

First lit for a papal visit, Alfa’s 5G in and around Beirut is now permanent — timed for the summer expat influx, with 70 percent of Lebanon the eventual target.

Published

3 weeks ago

August 5, 2026

Nour Nasir

lebanon's 5g era begins with 150 stations and a $1 million budget

Lebanon is switching on 5G, seven years after South Korea launched the world’s first nationwide commercial network. Touch and Alfa, the country’s two mobile operators, announced last week that they are expanding fifth-generation services in coordination with the Telecommunications Ministry, part of a three-year project to install 150 base stations split equally between them.

Alfa made the first move by permanently restoring the 5G stations it originally activated for Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Lebanon in late November 2025, bringing coverage to downtown Beirut, Antelias, Dekwaneh, the Beirut Port area, and the vicinity of the Presidential Palace in Baabda. The timing is deliberate: summer brings a wave of Lebanese expatriates home, and internet consumption spikes with them. Stations in Dbayeh, the airport area, Adlieh, and Jounieh come next, followed by 75 more across the country.

The Touch network is close behind, according to its chairman Karim Salam. “Today, we are moving from the preparation phase to the actual implementation phase ahead of the commercial launch of the service,” Salam stated, as the first batch of equipment arrived in Beirut.

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Touch, which selected technology from Huawei and Nokia, plans to activate 15 5G sites covering key areas of the capital before the end of August, with 60 more due between September and November in Beirut, Greater Beirut, the area around Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport, Batroun, Jbeil, Jounieh, Tripoli, Zahle, and several other areas outside the capital. A second phase will extend the network across the rest of the country, including the south, the area most affected by the war between Hezbollah and Israel since October 2023. Touch also intends to upgrade 75 sites to 4.5G and build 75 new rural sites before the end of 2026.

A Telecommunications Ministry source told L’Orient-Le Jour the project’s total cost is around $1 million, covering installation, license activation, and network upgrades. The first 150 stations are expected to reach 20 to 25 percent of subscribers; in later phases, the ministry says, that could rise to around 70 percent of the Lebanese population.

News

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 days ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.