A third of a century after Qatar launched its first public phone service in 1953 with a modest 150 lines, Law No. 13 created a state-owned company to run the sector. When Qatar Telecom (Qtel), now known as Ooredoo, moved into mobile services in 1994, its Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) was among the first in the Middle East. Only...
Qatari authorities have for years touted the importance of information technology (IT) as a driver of growth in knowledge-based sectors. They see IT as foundational to the country’s economic future, able not only to grow as an industry it its own right but to drive growth in other brain-heavy sectors like health, government and education, and...
Worldwide, broadband bandwidth is on the rise. Between 2005 and 2010, international bandwidth, measured by bits per second (bit/s) per user grew more than fivefold from 5464 to 28,772, according to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU). In Arab states, the trend was twice as fast, with bit/s per user growing more than 10-fold. That...
In 1949 Qatar set up its first automatic telephone exchange, a 50-line network that helped the state reach what was then considered a major milestone in telecommunications: eliminating the need for human operators. In the 63 years since, alongside an economic surge fuelled by the energy sector and a growing population, the telecoms industry evolved...
The use of Arabic on the web has made major gains in recent years, growing by 2500% between 2000 and 2011, according to a study by New York-based app translation firm Smartling. Arabic was the fastest-growing language on the micro-blogging site Twitter between 2010 and 2011, when the volume of Arabic posts grew more than 20 times, according to Paris...
Internet usage in Qatar has expanded, with fixed broadband subscriptions enjoying steady growth in the past decade. At the end of 2011, Qatar’s internet user penetration rate clocked in at 81.6%, far ahead of the Arab states’ average of 29.1% and the global average of 34.7%, according to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union. The financial...
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