Mobile telecoms to dominate Gitex this year

Mobile telephony is on the march in the region. All the signs indicate that mobile telephone companies are not only meeting their high expectations but surpassing them.

To pick a couple of recent examples: Mobily, Saudi Arabia's second mobile operator now expects to have two million subscribers by the end of this year, up from 1.2 million in its first three months; in Iraq MTC-Atheer is close to one million subscribers, three times the number expected in its business plan.

Not surprisingly the giants of network infrastructure development are gearing up for further massive expansion. Nokia has just announced the establishment of its new regional hub for network expansion in Jebel Ali.

The Finnish mobile giant's forecast is that 150 million subscribers in its broad Middle East and Africa region will become 328 million in five years time. This will make the region the fastest growing area for mobile telecommunications in the world.

Everywhere you look there is further expansion underway. In Saudi Arabia a third mobile phone license is expected by 2007, and the UAE has already announced that it is creating a second telecommunications company to rival Etisalat.

The technology is also not standing still. The UAE is often at the cutting edge of mobile telephony is this region, and should have a 1MB mobile service running next year, enabling the streaming of broadband video and other Internet services to mobile devices.

In contrast the IT sector can plot a more modest, though still very reasonable expansion linked to economic growth in the region. The technology is still getting better but price of computers and IT equipment is falling even faster, limiting the scope for higher profits in this sector.

The focus here is very much on getting more performance for less money. Hence, we see the phenomenon of huge interest in Linux, an operating system that can achieve significant savings if handled intelligently.

Even for the IT and software companies the biggest and brightest new clients are in the telecommunications sector. Starting a new telecoms operation from scratch means a massive investment in new IT infrastructure and software systems.

So all the action and excitement at this year's Gitex IT and computer show in Dubai, which is still the largest annual event of its kind in the region will be in the telecom sector, and more specifically the mobile telecom sector. This is the area with the most outstanding growth prospects over the next five years, and probably too the sector that will enjoy the most technological innovation.

And nobody should underestimate the wider implications of a telecommunications revolution - such an infrastructure is also the backbone of modern economic development.