Etisalat

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Emirates Telecommunication Establishment Etisalat
Type Public
Founded United Arab Emirates Government
Headquarters Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Key people Mohammed Hassan Omran Chairman, Mohammed Al Qamzi CEO
Etisalat
Etisalat

Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, also known as Etisalat (former Emirtel), is the incumbent telecommunications carrier and internet service provider in the United Arab Emirates. Etisalat provides all type of telecom services in addition to cable TV service. Etisalat is currently moving to a 3G network and NGN concept in its infrastructure.

In May 2005, the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority approved the formation of a new telecoms company, which will effectively end Etisalat's monopoly, creating a duopoly. The new $1.1 billion telecoms provider will be 40% owned by the UAE's General Pensions and Social Security Authority and other state interests, with the remaining shares earmarked for private sector shareholders including an initial public offering, which may or may not be open to foreigners.

According to WAM (official news agency of the United Arab Emirates), "At the end of September 2005, the number of lines in service are 1,222,905 for telephone, 4,305,821 for mobile and 4,698,17 for internet. Mobile penetration now exceeds 95 per cent."

Recently eCompany/Etisalat incorporated iZone, a system of WiFi hotspots in central locations, such as shopping malls, restaurants, and shisha cafe's. iZone can be utilized by either purchasing prepaid cards, which offer 15 AED/hour access rates (about 4.5 USD an hour), or if they are a dial-up internet user, they can use their previous existing account and pay 3 AED an hour (less than one USD per hour), or if they are a broadband user, they can use their account and gain access for 6 AED an hour (about 2.5 USD an hour).

On May 24th 2006, Etisalat officially released its new corporate logo, designed by UK based Rareform London.

On July 4th, 2006, a consortium led by Etisalat won the rights to develop Egypt's third mobile network, with a winning bid of 16.7 billion Egyptian Pounds (2.29 billion Euro)[1]. The new venture, named 'Nile Telecom' (English translation) will compete with existing service providers Vodafone and Mobinil. On September 12, 2006, it was announced that the network will be built by Ericsson, of Sweden, and Huwai, of China, at a cost of approximately 1.2 billion US dollars[2].

Etisalat is on an expansion spree. After making its presence felt in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and West Africa, Etisalat is prepared to pay up to $3 billion to bid for state-run Algerie Telecom.

Algeria is expected to announce details on a partial privatization of Algerie Telecom by March 2007. The Abu Dhabi-based firm has been expanding aggressively abroad as it has lost a virtual monopoly in the UAE to Dubai-based Du, which aims to gain 30% of the UAE market share.

Contents

[edit] eCompany

Although owned by Etisalat,"eCompany" (formally Emirates Internet & Multimedia), provides the Internet for the majority in the United Arab Emirates.

For home users, eCompany provides dial-up connection, ISDN connection, and cable and DSL connection. The Cable and DSL connections are known as "Al Shamil". Al Shamil offers speeds from 256K up to 2Mb.

eCompany was the sole Internet service provider of the United Arab Emirates, but temporarily a second ISP, Sahm Net, which was unaffected by eCompany's censorship, operated in certain new housing developments and Dubai Media City and Dubai Internet City. Recently Sahm was acquired by DIC (Dubai Internet City), although as of November 2006 they were still free of the UAE's proxy. As of November 2006, the new UAE telecoms company, under the name of du (telco) is due to begin operating, although it took an extra 3 months to officially start on the late Feb. 2007. The new telecommunication company (Du) is starting to gain a wide fame with variety of services such as (mobile TV, video calls, video mail, mobile broadband and different billing options)

The dial-up and ISDN connections are billed by the hour, whereas the Domestic/Residential Cable and DSL connections have a fixed monthly rate depending on speed, whereas Business connections are quite legendary for being billed depending on the amount of users and the usage of the connection.

[edit] Censorship

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TRA (www.tra.ae) blocks sites that may contain:

  1. Pornography
  2. Religious content and/or content that is against the religion of Islam
  3. Information about cracking, phreaking, etc
  4. Information on how to get around the internet block
  5. Dating and matrimonial sites (in particular non-Arabic ones)
  6. Gay and lesbian sites
  7. Criminal Skills
  8. The Israeli top-level domain (.il) [3]

Etisalat uses the American company SecureComputing, similarly to other GCC nations. They purchase lists of websites as classified by the SecureComputing company. According to the magazine TimeOut Dubai, the UAE government pays a little more than 9.5 Million AED each year to the SecureComputing company, the equivalent of 2.6 Million US Dollars, (this is worked out at the rate of 2$ USD per connection).

Etisalat's 'Blocked' page
Etisalat's 'Blocked' page

Etisalat rarely makes public announcements regarding the reasons for its blockages; users that do complain in the manner suggested by the ISP are usually greeted with a pre-written email which suggests the mentioned website contained nudity. Etisalat never announces that it is going to block / unblock a website; its actions are widely seen as obscure to the user on many counts. Etisalat employees have previously made statements in the media that they do not agree with the censorship of the internet; in many cases they point the finger towards the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority which apparently forces the censorship, as the country is Islamic.

Numerical Blocked Page
Numerical Blocked Page

On visiting a website that is blocked, the user will redirected to http://proxy.emirates.net.ae (only accessible from the UAE.) However, in cases where the blocking may be considered detrimental to public image, a generic TCP error page will be displayed instead. This second method has been witnessed in use after public scrutiny of the Skype block and is currently being used to block the popular social blogging site, LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com)

Also, Etisalat blocks numerical IP address from being directly accessed. Instead, they must enter a page address after the IP address. Example; Instead of 123.123.123.123, the user must enter 123.123.123.123/index.html

The SecureComputing system categorises sites into one of 62 categories, including pornography. Anyone can check what a site has been classified as and suggest an alternative or categorize an unlisted website using the URL: http://www.securecomputing.com/sfwhere/.

Etisalat also individually bans websites by IP address. In some cases, when alternative access is available (Etisalat does not proxy the HTTPS protocol, so if a site opens https ports it will always be available), they may remove the site from their DNS servers entirely; an example is http://www.antiproxy.com.

[edit] Controversy

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  • In mid 2000, Etisalat accused a British expat of hacking into its network, Lee Ashurst claimed to be being used by the ISP as a scapegoat.[citation needed]
  • In mid 2005, Etisalat had experienced supposed "international submarine cable cuts". These have brought Etisalat's so-called "redundant" network to its knees on more than one occasion. On occasions when the bandwidth throughput of the country have been affected, Etisalat prioritised http requests (web surfing) and blocked most other traffic completely. Etisalat said that either an anchor from a boat dragged on the seabed and damaged the cable, or a ship sank and fell on the cable damaging it. It denied compensation to individuals/companies affected by the internet cutoff, which lasted for several months. After initially instructing their support staff to deny any service problems for many days, to both business and private users, Etisalat finally emailed subscribers as follows during August 2005:

"Dear Valued Customer, You may have been experiencing slow speeds with your Internet service of late. The problem you may be facing is due to a temporary breakdown of international links resulting from a submarine cable cut outside the UAE and this repair is beyond our control. Etisalat and eCompany are coordinating with the global submarine cable operator to restore normalcy to the service at the earliest. The redundant links deployed by Etisalat for such an eventuality have meant that normal Internet browsing and email traffic will continue to work. However performance related to applications like gaming and peer to peer will be affected. We apologize for the inconvenience this disruption may have caused. We will keep you informed as soon as the service is restored to normalcy. At eCompany we are committed to giving you the best Internet experience possible and we look forward to your patience and understanding as we deal with this situation."


See also: Internet censorship

[edit] External links

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