MyAdhan Blog

Link: Bahrain: Batelco acquires exclusive rights to Al Dhameer Al Arabi content

Bahrain’s leading telecommunications company has acquired the exclusive rights to the mobile content for Al Dhameer Al Arabi, which is great news for Batelco 3.5G subscribers. Al Dhameer Al Arabi is a brand new music production that features over 100 famous Arabic artists who have come together to take part in a 40 minute premium video clip, produced by the famous producer Ahmed Al Arian. The video contains a montage of songs covering some of the most important and gravest issues the Arab world has faced in the last 10 years and is still facing today. Subscribe for free to Al Dhameer Al Arabi channel by sending DHAMEER1 to 4400 and, receive a video clip every day or by sending DHAMEER2 to 4400 receive MP3 tone every day. Charges apply on each piece of content.

Link: Etisalat prepares to enter Iraqi market

Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates is close to striking a deal to form a joint venture with a mobile operator in the Kurdish region of Iraq, the Abu Dhabi-based company’s chief executive says. Mohammad al-Qemzi told the Financial Times that the former UAE telecoms monopoly was in talks with an existing operator to form a new mobile joint-venture based in the area. The region has been Iraq’s most stable business environment since the US-led invasion in 2003, in spite of the current Turkish incursion aimed at rooting out Kurdish rebels. “We are now looking at a joint venture with an existing licence holder,” he said, without giving further details. “We are now just waiting for final agreement to get the deal done.” Mr al-Qemzi said the UAE company was also holding talks with the Kurdish regional government over the deal. Two of Iraq’s three mobile operating licences are held by leading Gulf-based consortiums: Atheer, headed by Kuwait’s Zain (formerly MTC), and AsiaCell, a joint venture between a Kurdish company and Kuwait’s Wataniya, acquired last year by Qatar’s Q-tel. The third licence was bought by a second Kurdish company, Korek, AsiaCell’s rival in the Kurdistan region. Korek had negotiated to acquire the assets of the licence’s former holder, Egypt’s Orascom, but the deal fell apart and Orascom’s network was sold to Zain in December. The aftermath left Korek with a licence purchased for $1.25bn, but without nationwide infrastructure. Hameed Akrawi, deputy chief executive of Korek, said he had been in discussions with several companies, including Etisalat. “We are still continuing discussions with them but we have no final agreement,” Mr Akrawi told the FT, declining further comment. Etisalat is in the midst of expansion into emerging markets across Africa and Asia, where it now has operations in 16 countries, as it seeks new customers beyond the UAE’s fast-growing but small market. The former monopoly, which faces competition from another government-controlled operator, Du, more than doubled its investment into its network in 2007 as net profit jumped to Dh7.3bn ($2bn) last year. The company has launched mobile operations in Nigeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but it lost out in an auction in neighbouring Qatar last year. Etisalat also plans to bid for a Lebanese mobile licence, which was scheduled for auction this month, although officials in Beirut had said the process could be delayed because of the country’s political gridlock.

Link: Bahrain to sell third mobile phone licence

Bahrain will sell a third mobile phone licence this year to boost competition and bring down prices, the head of the telecom regulator said on Thursday. Bahrain Telecommunications Co (Batelco) BTEL.BH and Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Co (Zain) operate two networks in the island state of about 743,000 people. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has put pressure on Batelco, which has about 70 percent of Bahrain’s mobile market, to cut prices and open its network to competitors. “The underlying prices of mobile calls have not fallen,” TRA director Alan Horne said told Reuters by telephone. “Some critics have said we have a cosy duopoly.” Bahrain would likely invite bidders in September and sell the licence by the end of 2008, Horne said, adding that a third operator would help reduce tariffs by increasing competition. Once a third licence is sold, Batelco would no longer have to seek regulator approval to alter charges for telephone calls, Horne said. “Batelco will no longer have to have their tariffs approved before setting them,” he said. The number of mobile subscriptions in the Gulf Arab state rose to more than 975,000 by the end of September, the regulator said. (Writing by Will Rasmussen; Editing by David Holmes).

Link: Internet outage hits Yemen

An internet outage affecting all internet users swept across Yemen last Saturday. The outage started at 11 a.m. Sana’a local time; 8 a.m. GMT. The outage severely affected the media and journalists that depend on the internet in their daily work as a means of communication or for publishing their news on websites. Ishtar Fuad, communications officer at the Yemen Observer said she kept trying to update the website from 11 am to 7 pm but couldn’t. “We have high speed internet service, ADSL, but the internet was so slow that I couldn’t even open a page,” said Ishtar. The outage caused big losses for the owners of internet cafes across the country. “Many customers tried to get access to the internet but could not, so they left without paying,” said Gamal Abdullah, owner of an internet café on al-Tahreer street in downtown Sana’a. “I have 45 computers which are usually occupied by internet users 24 hours [a day]. The rent of shops in downtown Sana’a is very expensive, so this outage represented a big loss for me,” said Abdullah. Ahmad al-Shahithi, an internet user, said he tried for almost 4 hours to send an email to his brother in Cairo, but failed. “ I could not even open my email. I tried four different internet cafes in different areas of Sana’a but could not get access to my email,” said al-Shahithi. Sami Taher, a journalist, said he could not send his news story and pictures to his newspaper. ”I tried to send the story and pictures from my home but could not, at first I thought it was a virus infecting my laptop that I could not open my email or any internet page, but when I tried to do that from other internet accesses I realized there was something wrong with the internet provider.

Link: Syria’s Telecom operator to invest EUR1bn in network

Related Link:
Syrian Telco Plans US$1.5 Billion Investment Over 5 Years

Revenues from mobile operators will boost the 2008 revenues of the Syrian Telecommunication Establishment to SYP62.5bn ($1.25bn). This record figure would represent a 12.8% increase over the 2007 figure, which is estimated at SYP54.5bn ($1.09bn). In 2007, income had risen by 14.7% compared to the previous year. This increase will be largely the consequence of a 23.8% projected surge in fees collected from the two mobile phone firms, Syriatel and MTN. Under the terms of the 15-year Buy Operate Transfer (BOT) contract signed with the two operators, STE will collect the equivalent of half of the two firms’ total income starting this year. This rate stood at 40% in 2007. In 2008, STE plans to collect SYP27.5bn from MTN and Syriatel, up from SYP21bn in 2007. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers to the GSM networks is continuing its double digit annual growth. On October 31, 2007 the number of subscribers to Syriatel and MTN stood at 6.2 million, up from 4.4 million at the end of 2006. Syriatel has a market share of 55%, with almost 3.5 million subscribers, while MTN had 2.7 million subscribers.

Link: Afganistan: Taliban Threaten Phone Companies

Taliban militants threatened Monday to blow up telecom towers across Afghanistan if mobile phone companies do not switch off their signals for 10 hours starting at dusk. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujaheed said the U.S. and other foreign troops in the country are using mobile phone signals to track down the insurgents and launch attacks against them. The Taliban have “decided to give a three-day deadline to all mobile phone companies to stop their signals from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. in order to stop the enemies from getting intelligence through mobile phones and to stop Taliban and civilian casualties,” Mujaheed told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location. “If those companies do not stop their signal within three days, the Taliban will target their towers and their offices,” he said. There are four mobile phone operators in Afghanistan, but employees at the companies would not immediately comment. Mobile phones were introduced to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. They have become the principal means of communication and one of the fastest-growing and most profitable sectors in the country’s economy. Militants have threatened mobile phone companies in the past, accusing them of collusion with the U.S. and other foreign military forces. Communications experts say the U.S. military has the ability, using satellites and other means, to pick up cell phone signals without the phone company’s help. Cell phones periodically send signals to the network even when they are not making calls. Mujaheed said the Taliban have contacted all the companies, but none has agreed to the militants’ demands. His claim could not be independently verified.

Follow up story: How Pakistan knocked YouTube offline (and how to make sure it never happens again)

A high-profile incident this weekend in which Pakistan’s state-owned telecommunications company managed to cut YouTube off the global Web highlights a long-standing security weakness in the way the Internet is managed. After receiving a censorship order from the telecommunications ministry directing that YouTube.com be blocked, Pakistan Telecom went even further. By accident or design, the company broadcast instructions worldwide claiming to be the legitimate destination for anyone trying to reach YouTube’s range of Internet addresses. The security weakness lies in why those false instructions, which took YouTube offline for two hours on Sunday, were believed by routers around the globe. That’s because Hong Kong-based PCCW, which provides the Internet link to Pakistan Telecom, did not stop the misleading broadcast–which is what most large providers in the United States and Europe do. This is not a new problem. A network provider in Turkey once pretended to be the entire Internet, snarling traffic and making many Web sites unreachable. Con Edison accidentally hijacked the Internet addresses for Panix customers including Martha Stuart Living Omnimedia and the New York Daily News. Problems with errant broadcasts go back as far as 1997. It’s also not an infrequent problem. An automatically-updated list of suspicious broadcasts created by Josh Karlin of the University of New Mexico shows apparent mischief–in the form of dubious claims to be the true destination for certain Internet addresses–taking place on an hourly basis. So why hasn’t anyone done something about it? False broadcasts can amount to a denial-of-service attack and, if done with malicious intent, can send unsuspecting users to a fake bank, merchant, or credit card site. To understand why this is both a serious Internet vulnerability and also difficult to fix requires delving into the technical details a little…

Link: Pakistan: Mobile imports decline by 9.18% during July-Jan 2008

The import of mobile phones went down by 8.18 percent in the first seven months of the current financial year. Pakistan imported mobile phones worth $440,976 million during July-January 2007- as compared with $480,265 million during the same period last year. According to the industry analysts, the reason of this decline in the mobile phone imports is the country’s political uncertainty. While on the other hand now a days due to the rapid increase of mobile phone theft people are preferring to buy low cost or second hand mobile sets. The government of Pakistan is contemplating offering incentives to the leading manufacturers of cellular mobile handsets and telecom equipment to consider manufacturing of cellular mobile handsets and other equipments in Pakistan where cheap labour and other inputs are easily available. In the current scenario the mobile phone manufacturers are not interested in investing huge amount in the country. During July 2007-January 2008, other telecom machineries worth $841,383 million were imported as against $761,609 million during the same period in July 2006– January 2007, depicting an increase of 10.47 percent. While, on the whole the telecom import registered an increase of 3.26 percent, as worth of $1,282,359 of mobile phone and telecom apparatus were imported during July 2007- January 2008 of the current fiscal year as compared with $1,241,874 during the same period in July 2006 - January 2007. A cellular phone retailer at Gulshan-e- Iqbal said the sale of used mobiles has gone up as people prefer to carry second hand mobile due to the increase in street crimes where mainly people are snatched their mobile phones on gun point.To compete with each other, mobile phone companies are reducing the rates of sets, boosting the trend of replacing old mobiles with new ones. Recently China Mobile is taking the lead and investing huge amount in advertising to compete with the other mobile phone operators.

Link: Pakistan: Use of mobiles to be prohibited during driving

Senior Superintendent of Islamabad Traffic Police Muhammad Zubair Hashmi said on Sunday that the ITP aimed to restrict the use of mobiles phones while driving and had made fastening of seat belts mandatory to reduce the number of road accidents in the capital. He said a summary in this regard had been sent to the Ministry of Interior, which recommends “the use of mobile phone while driving is prohibited and fastening of seat belt during driving is mandatory according to traffic rules.” After the notification, fine will be imposed on violations by the ITP personnel, the SSP said, adding that ITP Mobile Education Units would become operational to educate road users about traffic rules and regulations at various crossings and main avenues. Referring the use of mobile phones during driving and not fastening seat belts as one of the causes of accidents, Hashmi said the ITP had started a special education campaign to educate road users about fastening seat belts and avoid using mobile phones while driving.

Link: Batelco, PCCW and Verizon get Saudi phone OK

Related News: Batelco rolls out ‘freetime 2000′ package

Consortiums led by Bahrain Telecommunications Co BTEL.BH (Batelco), Hong Kong’s PCCW (0008.HK: Quote, Profile, Research) and U.S. Verizon Communications won final approval on Monday to operate new Saudi fixed-line phone networks. The official news agency SPA said the Saudi cabinet approved a decision under which the three new firms set up to operate the fixed-line services would sell 25 percent of their shares in initial public offerings, 10 percent to a state pension fund and 5 percent to a social insurance body. Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy, had given initial approval to the three groups in April after short-listing them from 10 applicants for licences to end the monopoly of state-controlled Saudi Telecom Co 7010.SE (STC). The consortium of Bahrain Telecom (Batelco) and Saudi Arabia’s Atheeb group plans to invest $1 billion in its fixed-line operation in the first five years of business, Atheeb’s chairman said on Sunday. Saudi Arabia had liberalised mobile phone services earlier. STC lost its mobile monopoly to Etihad Etisalat 7020.SE (Mobily) in 2005, while a consortium led by Kuwait’s Zain won a third mobile licence in March.