Information CommunicationS Technology (ICT)
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| Photo: Satellite dishes littering underside of residential building in Sharjah |
Landlines
During the creation of the telephone networks, country codes and area codes were distributed according to the region’s importance. For example, the country code for North America is +1 while Europe is +3 or +4. +9 is reserved for many Middle Eastern countries, including +971 for the United Arab Emirates. World cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Toronto have +212, +20, +3, and +416 respectively. Rotary phones that work through a series of clicks take longer to dial 9 and 0 than 1 and 2. With the emergency of dial tones, the correlation of lower numbers and world cities has been made less apparent.
Photo: Etisalat headquarters in Deira
Etisalat has a monopoly in telecommunications for the UAE. The company is owned by the monarchy which reaped 3.16 billion dirhams ($996 million CAD) in profits for 2005. Mobile penetration exceeds 95% of the population while internet penetration at home is about 10% of Dubai’s population19.
Mobile Phones
Mobile phone prices are based on prepaid plans with Wasel has usage costs at $0.09 for every minute. This is a change from the $0.30 initial connection charge for the first minute12, this is because a private company known as Du has been allowed to come into the market. Incoming calls and caller ID have always been free with cellphone service. Toronto’s Fido offers prepaid plans at $0.30 per minute11 which is comparable for the first minute but 3 times the cost of subsequent minutes. Etisalat also does offer monthly plans and costs appear to be one-third that of Toronto.
Internet
Al Shamil, Etisalat’s internet division offers DSL monthly plans from $31 to $110 for 256kbps to 2mbps respectively. Prices are still much higher than Toronto where a 2mbps connection costs about 25% less per month.
Etisalat has a proxy which automatically censors a large number of websites. These range from chat-rooms to pornographic websites. Also, sites that talk negatively about the Emirates are banned quickly and all internet traffic is monitored. Third-party proxies which enable users to bypass the firewall through a remote computer are also banned along with sites hosting torrents, software key generators and some security sites that might contain information on hacking.
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| Photo: Screenshot of a site blocked by the Etisalat proxy server |
Google has setup a special search portal for the UAE (http://www.google.ae), similar to China’s Google portal. This page can be translated into English, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi and Arabic; revealing the most commonly used languages of Dubai. The search engine does not filter results since the Etisalat proxy does this instead. Google’s cached feature does allow users to view some banned content, but accessing files does not work.
