Reports and Coverage

The increased adoption of smart mobile devices since the early 2000s created an explosion in the demand for data and value-added services. Telco service providers found themselves in a constant race to satisfy KPI baseline values under increasing pressures from dwindling margins and prevalent business models in highly-penetrated market. Rapidly evolving consumer and business requirements and the need to develop and deliver cost-effective quality services overwhelmed the imperative to make long-term investments with calculated risks.

UAE is ranked number one for the highest Fiber to the Home (FTTH) penetration among all its global counterparts for a third year in a row, according to the leading industry body FTTH Council

The 12th edition of the Telecom Review Leaders Summit in Beirut, Lebanon is expected to attract the region’s most prominent ICT experts and technology thought leaders in an effort to explore and examine the current opportunities and challenges in the telecommunications industry.

By Clery Tonneau, head of Products Department and head of Mobile Financial Services, Sofrecom

For some years, telecom and bank regulators have demanded a 100% reliable verification of customers’ identity, also known as KYC (know your customer), in order to prevent identity theft fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing. Unfortunately, traditional KYC methods are both cumbersome and error-prone.

Digital transformation is all around us, revamping the core practices of businesses. Communications service providers (CSPs) are also looking to transform what they do and how they do it. They face a demanding public, hungry for content consumption and creation capabilities and a business community that relies on robust telecoms for its own digitisation initiatives.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast predicts 4.8 billion Internet users to be connected globally by 2022, out of which 549 million will be living in the Middle East and Africa.

Global smartphone sales saw their worst contraction ever in 2018, and the outlook for 2019 isn't much better, new surveys show. Worldwide handset volumes declined 4.1% in 2018 to a total of 1.4 billion units shipped for the full year, according to research firm IDC, which sees a potential for further declines this year. “Globally the smartphone market is a mess right now,” said IDC analyst Ryan Reith. “Outside of a handful of high-growth markets like India, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, we did not see a lot of positive activity in 2018.”

By Charles Yang, president of Huawei Middle East

As Huawei reflects on 2018, the challenges around us today and our goals for 2019, we see one thread linking the past, present and future: our unshakeable commitment to bringing digital to every home, person and organization, for a fully-connected and intelligent world. We are global, regional and local pioneers in transformative ICT, connecting the world on a historically unprecedented scale.

There are growing concerns in Europe that if the regulatory environment doesn’t change, the continent will be left behind in relation to the commercialization and subsequent deployment of 5G networks. That was the general consensus which was shared amongst a number of high-profile and prominent figures from the ICT industry during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Ja-Square, a Lebanese-based company that specializes in producing smart technological solutions and IoT services has been showcasing its latest innovations at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.