My Experience With the Telecom Industry in Lebanon

I spent my summer interning for the one and only Lebanese telecom operator Ogero. And I have to admit that it was a great and enlightening journey from the start all the way to the end. My mentor and Engineer was an amazing fellow who taught me and my colleagues so much about the suppliers of the telephony service in Lebanon. It is funny that even for the telephony service this little piece of the Middle East is divided into chunks when it comes to the companies that supply Lebanon with the equipment. This is an issue because each company maintains its own designs and equipment that are different than the other. For example Subscriber boards and CPs (central processors) in the Alcatel closets are different in size, shape, location and wiring from those in the Siemens or even the Ericsson closets. This is not necessary a good thing. Different equipment mean different engineers trained in different technologies and finally even more equipment that is supposed to help those different subscriber stages and switches communicate with each other.

In this internship we learned about the Ericsson AXE10 functions, operation and maintenance of faults and alarms. We were showed how routing and numbering plans work. It was all fun and games until it was time for typing the project report. Our task was to design the switching platform of a telephony network responsible for covering the South and the Bekaa areas of Lebanon. We were to take into consideration the traffic flow in the Local, Transit and Remote Switches and the allowed number of call losses per minute. This design should be able to service the area for the next five years.

Everything was all fun and games until it was time to type up the project report. I am generally someone who excels at writing reports and I take great pleasure in research and even greater pride in the work I submit. Yet this time I found myself stuck with trying to find data online about the domain of telephony without accessing my university library because I’m at home and home is an hour’s commute away. Even then I doubt I would have been able to find what I was looking for. I do have to admit that our mentor had warned us to take notes of what he says because the ins and outs of the telephony industry are not as in the open as the ins and outs of networking. To test this theory, go to your favorite search engine and type the words Networking Books and then type the words Telephony Books. Compare the results you get. See how much material pop up offering free insider data on networking. Try to see if any telephony links even broach on what is contained inside an EMG. Now try Google the acronym EMG. It stands for Extension Module Group. You get two relevant entries. One on what EMG stand for, and another on creating module that is not really related to working land lines. In reality, it’s what you see in the photo and it is what I was looking at and sitting with the whole duration of this internship.

I am sure finding things online depends on the keywords you input in your search engine, but I assure you I have only once looked for a book/site/mp3 I ever wanted for free and did not get. I still remember the incident very bitterly; i was looking for the soundtrack Rainmaker by Sara Haze from the movie Center Stage 2.

Anyway, going back to the topic at hand, I’m glad this time that I am a very vicious note-taker in class, I did find some of what I was looking for I just have to admit that I wasn’t able to add some acronyms in my Table of Acronyms at the start of my report and had to use them as is because I couldn’t find the words they stand for. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping whoever corrects my report doesn’t notice the two missing acronyms.