Husam Abulhul, CEO of LTT talks about the internet in Libya and the plans for the future upgrade of the sector.

According to Abulhul; "The internet service in Libya started in 1997 with the first service provided by Libya Telecom who was the first internet service provider in Libya. The company was founded and owned by one of Gaddafi’s sons and he had the monopoly on the market. It was directed by government policy and was only concerned with serving the needs of the dictator, his family and his regime. This is the background of the company. We faced a lot of problems providing the service to the Libyan people, and they blamed us for serving just one man and not the people. The company was standing by the side of this family and that was a bad thing for the company reputation."

For the medium and long term the LTT would like to increase the number of users and to improve the quality of the services. "We are focusing on the mass market; we have two main services here: WiMAX and ADSL. We are expanding these two services over the whole of Libya. We have almost 200,000 subscribers for WiMAX and almost 100,000 subscribers for ADSL. It is my target and the target of the Ministry of Communications to increase the number of internet subscribers in Libya by another 300,000 based on our network capacity. We are close to achieving 400,000 new subscribers, which will increase the internet penetration in the country from 5% to 15% - and this is our target," adds, Abulhul.