Originally posted by: Rainsford
Originally posted by: Condor
Originally posted by: yllus
Iraq mobile phone use could grow 400 pct in 2005
DUBAI (Reuters) - The number of mobile phone subscribers in Iraq could grow by 400 percent to about 5 million by the end of 2005, a leading telecommunications operator in the strife-torn country said on Sunday.
But MTC Atheer, a joint venture between Kuwait's Mobile Telecommunications Co and Iraq's Atheer Telecom, will not make profits until at least 2007 because Iraqi phone bills are still fairly small, said the firm's Chief Executive Ali al-Dahwi.
MTC Atheer has a market share of between 30 percent and 40 percent in a country where a conflict pitting insurgents against government troops and U.S.-led forces has taken a huge toll on the civilian population.
"Today we are reaching very close to 1 million subscribers, I think we will achieve that within the next week or so, and I think we are going to exceed 1.5 million by the end of the year," Dahwi told Reuters in an interview.
Dahwi said that would amount to 400 percent growth over the whole of 2005 and that demand for mobile phones had greatly exceeded expectations.
Though all this, MTC Atheer is also
creating almost 10,000 direct and indirect jobs for Iraqis and helping put together one badly needed element of a nation's infrastructure that we now take for granted. The mostly unreported construction of Iraq rolls onwards.
🙂
And providing the bad guys with a communications system as well as a means to trigger bombs. If it were me, I'd shut them off until all the bad guys were dead!
That seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Communications systems are vital to the growth of any modern country, and while shutting down the cell network would hamstring that growth for the good guys, the bad guys would almost certainly just use something else.
The concept of shutting down a communication network for an area to prevent terrorist attacks has been proposed many times (in the US it has been suggested as a response to a future 9/11), and the problem with doing so always remains the same...it's movie plot security. It is designed to stop a specific attack that the bad guys could just avoid using, while at the same time causing all sorts of negative consequences of its own (like they never show in movie plots...).
Think like a terrorist for a second. I shut off your cell phone, how difficult is it for you to still communicate with your buddies and set off remote bombs? Maybe it takes a little skull sweat, and the result isn't quite ideal. So super, I managed to slightly annoy you while destroying what is obviously an important part of a recovering country. Doesn't seem like a good tradeoff.
