Tunis, July 13, 2009- A recent report by Pyramid Research dubbed “Communications Market in Tunisia”, says that Tunisia’s telecom market is set to become one of the fastest growing in the Africa Middle East market with total revenues estimated at 2,2 billion dollars by 2014 on the basis of a growth average of some 5,4% over the next five years.

The 24 page report provides an accurate analysis of Tunisia telecom sector: fixed and mobile sectors, WiMax, IPVT, and VoIP. It also provides an analysis of key trends, short term opportunities and risk factors.

The author of the report Sylvia Boguszweska, writes that event though Tunisia’s mobile and fixed penetration were among the highest in the region in 2008 with 82,1 % and 11,5% respectively, the low broadband penetration rate of some 2,2% shows a strong potential for growth.

“Although the market will contract in 2009, it will bounce back with broadband being the fastest growing among other significant market segments. Broadband services will be a considerable source of growth over the next five years with an annual growth of 15,1% between 2009 and 2014, producing an estimated revenue of 174 million dollars in 2014 up from 81 million dollars in 2008”, says the author of the report.

In June 2009, a consortium made up of France Telecom and Divona /Orange was awarded the third mobile license in Tunisia. The license covers both regular GSM services and 3G, as well as landline services.

The French consortium who made an offer of some 257,251 million dinars (137,647 million Euros), won the bid after being in competition with Turkey’s Turkcell.

There are currently two mobile telephone operators in the country, “Tunisie Telecom” and Orascom’s “Tunisiana”. In 2006, Tunisia Telecom opened up 35% of its capital to Dubai’s Tecom-DIG for some 1,8 billion Euros

Source [Tunisia Online News]

According to an article published on the weekly newspaper "EL Mosawi, a commission charged with resolving conflicts between the operator Tunisie Telecom and Internet service providers (ISPs) will be created within the national telecommunication.

The commission is thus assigned to solve problems related to poor access of subscribers to the Internet.

In the same context, the commission will rule on liability of defects in the connection between the incumbent Tunisie Telecom and ISPs. It should be noted that each of the parties is Tunisie Telecom or ISP always throw the responsibility for failing to connect on the other. Thus, the subscriber will be cut between the jet of responsibility between the two.

Recall that the number of ADSL (broadband Internet) is estimated at 400,000 in 2009 against 212 000 subscribers in 2008 of which 52% of connections are at speeds greater than 512kb / s.

And according to the minister of communication technologies, the decrease of 25% of the price of connections recorded in the year 2008 will continue in 2009 to attract more customers.

However, this expansion of ADSL creates an obligation to have a national body to resolve disputes between customers and stakeholders in the circuit.

Source [investir-en-tunisie]

Tunis — A study carried out by the Arab Advisors Group, ranks Tunisia 3rd in the Arab world where investors have the highest share of revenues.

The report entitled "Privatization Levels in Arab Fixed and Cellular operators " , analyzed the ownership structure and revenues of all fixed PSTN lines and cellular operators in 16 Arab countries.

The analysis also aimed at examining the actual level of privatization and state ownership in each country measured by the proportionate share of each operator of total market revenues during the three first terms of 2008.

The study shows that Lebanon and Libya have the least privatized telecom markets with 100% government ownership of fixed and cellular telecom revenues. In terms of foreign ownership proportionate share of revenues, the study ranks Jordan first with 75% of fixed and cellular revenues, followed by Sudan and Tunisia.

The Arab Advisors Group is a group of advisors, analysts and consultants specialized in ICT, the media and technology in the Arab world.

Tunisia recently launched an international call for tender for third fixed and cellular telephone operator. Results of the bid will be announced in May 2009.

The country's two existing operators are "Tunisie Telecom" which in 2006 privatized 35% of its capital, and "Tunisiana" a private company, owned by Orascom.

Via [All Africa]

It has almost down since this morning, an insider from Tunisie Telecom is reporting a general failure due to an issue with the DNS server related to the ARPA or ICANN -still not quite sure.

The issue has been sloved right now, the ISP recommanded their customers to restart their router/modems

Even Tunisia, which has a less thriving economy than SA, has a greater penetration rate, connecting 12.68 people per 1 000, he said.

Tunisia is having the biggest rate of connected people on broadband Internet of the whole continent.

Source [ITWeb]

It turns that Tunisie Telecom after warning people about the possible network outage, have changed its version from "maintenance" to "incident", the limited internet access accruing those days can longer more that the 12 hours planned to take a couple of other weeks, in the meanwhile, we hope the 2nd submarine cable will make it.

A insider from an other Telecommunication company doubts about TT tellings and wonders what does happens really to the Internet when it did sweep its customers om ISDN lines in the wait of restoring the international T1 connection.

The prophecy was true, one of the main submarine cables providing Tunisia with connection (Phone and Data) over Italy is down as the maintenance of the famous cut cables going to middle east from Europe.

The country is working as its half speed, a low connection is remarkably here and everybody wonder the worst, the remaining France connection is the only link to the outer world and as it happened in the middle east, things have started by a maintenance and half of cables eaten by fish.

Ob of the rumors to explain the whole "accident" thing is that there was a submarine earthquake that did damage the cables, others are talking about a conspiracy trying to push the middle east back to the dark ages, while all this happens nobody can really find an answer.

Tunisia is connected to the outer world through tow submarine connections: the major one from France and the other from Italy thus I have been acknowledged from a Tunisie Telecom(Tunisia monopolist telephone company) Insider that the internet connection would be down tonight from 10 pm to 10 am local time (+1 CST) for maintenance purposes.

What the hell is going on? and even if there was such maintenance works, why we shouldn't be able to get through the other one even with limited access? in my humble opinion we would be off for a while, exactly as it happened in the middle east.

Something is happen inning in the background and nobody wants to tell about it, I'll may be able to write again here. in the meanwhile hope me good luck, in Tunisia Internet is no more an alternative playground for kids, it's about 90% business communications gateway.

Even most of the wireless connections that goes through Wimax and Satellite will be affected as the providers such as Divona contract the Inetrbet service from a cable Partner (Planet), those few lucky companies who have dedicated up link and down link will be the only one getting to the outer world.

I can't pretend that the red and white crew teamed up with the penguin, but they have some touch of gods, in fact their last home-made installer for their brand new Air cards (HSDPA USB Modem)is powered by the most lovely and free installer innosetup, the above screen shot shows a personalized installer embed inside the card making the Air card much much easy to install. I just wish other Tunisian companies follow the example of this big red bear, you know about whom I'm talking about.

You may have noticed a number of stories recently about undersea cables getting cut around the world. Apparently the total is now up to 5, but the scariest part of this is that Iran is now offline. You can also read Schneier's comments on this coincidence.

Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group, has had two cables damaged in the span of a week -- a quandary it has never dealt with until now. As it stands, traffic from the Middle East and surrounding areas is being routed through various other cables in an attempt to remain online, but any more snips and we could be dealing with ping times eerily similar to those seen in 1993 (or much, much larger issues).

Via [SlashDot]
Via [Engaget]



Any coming war into the gulf? internet for Petrol pressure? I wonder what's coming next and I know that doesn't mean a simple offline issue, it's about something really dangerous.

NEW DELHI: Internet communication links for hundreds of millions of people in India and across the world were disrupted after an anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged two submarine cables Sea-Me-We-4 and Flag on Wednesday morning.

Internet users faced a slowdown in service with many websites remaining either totally inaccessible or taking a considerably long time to download.

While early on Thursday, reports of disruption appeared severe with ISP Association of India's president, R Chharia estimating almost 50% of net connections in the country to be down, damage control efforts by companies saw a near complete restoration of services by late evening.

"Since internet is now the nerve centre for business and communication, our real concern is focussed on lack of access for users. This episode points to a need for superior disaster management of the IT ecosystem," says Naresh Ajwani, president, Sify Ltd.
However, the situation did manage to take a favourable turn.

"Our teams worked all night to restore services to 80% of our customers and the balance will be taken care of by the end of the day", said Manoj Kohli, president, Bharti Airtel.

Sea-Me-We-4 is a 20,000 km optical submarine cable network which links the 14 countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.

Bharti Airtel, India's leading telecom services firm and Tata-owned VSNL are part of the consortium that owns Sea-Me-We-4 while the Reliance Group owns Flag.

According to Kohli, customers will now only face a latency problem of about 700 milliseconds, but no disruption of services.

"Its been an extraordinary event, its impact has been most severe in India and the Middle East", admits David Nishball, president, enterprise services, Bharti Airtel.

According to Nishball, services to voice customers, private leased circuits across the Atlantic and private networks of corporates have been completely restored.

"However, IT customers have been severely impacted. We have rerouted them to the Pacific route from the Atlantic route, so there is some congestion", he says.

However, Nishball says that customer experience should see a dramatic improvement over the next 24 hours owing to efforts to put up additional circuits on the cable network to increase the capacity of the highway to accommodate the additional traffic.

Via [The Times of India]