You ask a lot of questions at the same time. Maybe you need to hire someone to gather and present all this info for you. This little free forum is not an information company or a state agency. Here are some partial answers to some of your questions
* In Lebanon, DSL became available only a couple of years ago:
Lebanon is more than 10 years late on this matter. Offers are expensive, limited in speed and limited in monthly GB. Lebanon is most probably THE WORST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD for the web. (If someone knows just one country that is worse that Lebanon for ISP's, please let us know here.) The government has always been preventing other company to develop it, because they wanted to create their own first and have the monopoly. They also did not want the people to use SKYPE and VOIP stuff, because the local Telecom company would loose money... It seems this is the main reason Lebanon is very late and offers very bad solutions for the Internet.
* Today DSL is available for this sort of price & speed:
512 kbps = about $50 per month (limited to 4GB of download & 4GB of upload per month)
1 mbps = about $70 per month (limited to 5GB of download & 5 GB of upload per month)
* The country’s best known internet providers are:
- OGERO, is the company who offers the best DSL service, because they are the only authorized provider. All the other ISP must buy from them so they make sure their connection is perfect to get more clients and keep the others behind. They are related to the Government. It's a sort of mafia. I don't know all the details, maybe someone else can elaborate. More details on their website (ogero.gov.lb).
- IDM is a big company. They are still alive because they were the biggest company before DSL became available. Now they are forced to offer special features to stay competitive : they allow unlimited download from late at night until dawn... They used to be very "thirld world" in the past. They used to practice SPAM and present it to their clients as "email marketing". More details on their website (idm.net.lb).
- MOBI is a wireless product that can be subscribed for through resellers. More details on their website (mobi.tm)
* Which are the most common means of payment for online shopping in this country (online payment providers ) ?
- There are a few by they are not very good. They cannot seriously compete with the ones outside of Lebanon. Their only value it to be based in Lebanon and offer companies who have no choice, the possibility of using a local service.
- The "best" one is probably NETCOMMERCE (netcommerce.com.lb) powered by Fransabank and Credit Libanais.
- Another one is Banque Audi's system. More details on their website (banqueaudi.com).
