Etisalat Briefs SAMENA Telecommunications Council on major trends in international connectivity

Referring to capacity additions driven by growing traffic and constantly enriched Internet content, Ali Amiri, Etisalat's Executive Vice President for Carrier and Wholesale Services told the SAMENA Telecommunications Council members that the region's economies need scalable, diverse and robust submarine cable network to remain connected and meet demand.

'The need for capacity is a global trend,' said Ali Amiri. 'Internet content is getting richer and the number of access devices and the number of people able to access are growing massively. This means the demand for higher access speeds is growing, which means the capacity required to access this content should also be increased.'

Amiri explained how rich multimedia consumer applications, coupled with new demands from businesses and bandwidth hungry mobile access technologies is driving operators to partner and invest in capacity additions. He highlighted two of the most recent projects driven by Etisalat as examples - TEAMS (The East Africa Marine System) and the IWEME (India, West Europe and Middle East) project.

'As we are a full-service carrier and wholesale operator, we must continue to develop our network connectivity options to meet growing demand as well as increase capacity, quality and diversity of our services. This is a continuous mission for us as we seek to extend broad band connectivity and reliable voice services to Africa, Asia and beyond,' Amiri continued.

Ali Amiri also addressed the quantity of Internet content that is located in Europe and the US and the vulnerability of operators in the region especially in light of disasters such as the recent cable cuts in the Mediterranean and the Gulf.

'Fast access to content is critical, whether there is a crisis or not, and the demand for content is growing. This means carriers must have a powerful international connectivity strategy in place if they are to maintain their competitive advantage,' Amiri said.

He then went on to explain some of the steps Etisalat took to protect UAE businesses, which ensured that the UAE was the least effected country during the recent crisis.

'The Emirates Internet Exchange (EMIX) stood up to the challenge of the recent cable cuts, providing an entry point that helped restore much of the lost traffic through its network of peering partners, Points of Presence (POPs) and other network suppliers. Etisalat also has a large number of partners offering connectivity for international voice, including AT&T, Belgacom, Bharti, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, France Telecom, KDDI, KPN, Reach, Singtel, TATA, Telecom Italia, Verizon, and VSNL. Any affected traffic was immediately transferred to alternative paths as per its existing routing agreements with these operators,' Amiri explained.

Amiri also highlighted the work of Etisalat subsidiary E-Marine. Two of E-Marine's cable ships were deployed in February to repair the damaged infrastructure in the Gulf, bringing regional connectivity back to normalcy by February 14.

Etisalat is the largest carrier of voice traffic in the Middle East, terminating calls at over 600 destinations, with 118 direct connections and Points of Presence in the UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, New York, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

Ahmad Mokhles, Senior Manager-Consumer Segment, Etisalat presented the features of Etisalat's Mobile TV (MTV) services to the Council members.

'Etisalat's Mobile TV is one of the most advanced among the services we offer to our customers.

It allows mobile users with 3G enabled handsets to watch popular news, sport and entertainment from local and international channels live on their phones.

MTV has so far added 15 channels to its platform to accommodate different customer needs and the number of subscribers has reached 228.000, with an average of 40 minutes of usage per subscriber.

'Mobile TV is positioned under the Mobile Portal of Etisalat - Weyak - to increase Mobile Portal Awareness as well as simplicity of use to the end users, as demanded by our market research and usability tests', he added.

Mokhles pointed out that MTV had achieved a lot in a short period, increasing its customer's base through various offerings including live cricket broadcast.

The service was recently recognised by the GSMA as the Best Operator in the Region for 2007 on account of its 3G/HSPA rich portfolio.

The Video On Demand ( VoD) and the Music Full Track features of MTV also evoked great interest when they were demonstrated for the first time in the ME and GCC at Gitex 2007.