The Internet revolution reaches Arabia (page 1 of 3)

You have new mail. Shall I read them out to you now, sir?" asks your computer as you walk into your office. Sitting in a café, your daughter shops for the very latest mobile phone; she asks her notebook to search for the lowest price worldwide, and it orders one for her from a shop in Amman.

An illiterate old man in a village in southwestern Saudi Arabia is having trouble with his eyesight; 20 minutes after visiting the local cyberhealth station, a Riyadh-based opthamologist makes his diagnosis and e-mails a prescription. Scenes from the latest science-fiction thriller? Maybe. Reality in the Arab world in less than a decade? Certainly.

Five years is an era in the rapidly evolving world of the Internet and new technology. Consider that when this magazine was launched, just over five years ago, the office was equipped with computers - but just one with a tortuously slow, dial-up Internet connection.

Articles were received by fax, or if we were lucky, via diskette posted by mail. Searching for photos meant a trip to the local agency; newspapers were our main source for breaking news; and work was extremely centralized, since there was no efficient alternative.

Today, this magazine communicates seamlessly and simultaneously with its offices across Europe and the Arab world. Even internal communication now primarily takes place by e-mail. Photographers worldwide can send digital photos in nearly real time; correspondents keep in constant touch from Baghdad, Riyadh, Washington and Dubai.

The news from the region and the world breaks ceaselessly, via the Internet, offering a range of opinions, the wildest mix of fact and fiction.
In five years, technology has transformed the way we work and live. And there's no question that that transformation will continue to keep pace - everywhere in the world.

In the Middle East, demand for new technology has outstripped supply; demand not just for more powerful laptops, smaller cellphones and WiFi cafés, but demand for the genuinely transformative power of technology. The power to connect with the world.

Five years ago in the Middle East, the typical Internet service provider (ISP) was a state telecom monopoly, which saw the Internet as more of an irritant than an opportunity. These state-run companies mostly invested next to nothing in developing access to new technologies like the Internet.

Infrastructure was extremely basic, and using the Internet and e-mail a painfully slow process. Meanwhile, connectivity fees were exorbitantly high - so high, in fact, that websites were launched throughout the region with the sole intent of accusing the ISPs of cheating customers.

On the demand side, the situation was hardly better. The high price of a personal computer, widespread illiteracy and the general lack of awareness about the Internet meant that the penetration rates were among the lowest in the world, with some Arab countries recording barely 0.01 percent penetration as late as 1999.

However, since then Internet penetration rates have skyrocketed - at least in some parts of the Arab world. According to a recent report by Amman-based Arab Advisors, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE are the current regional leaders in terms of overall connectivity. Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria are the Arab world's least connected countries.

In the United Arab Emirates, where Internet user penetration is among the highest in the world, a third of the 3 million residents of the UAE regularly uses the Internet, either professionally or personally or, increasingly, both.