As of mid-2024, the UAE’s telecom market is effectively a duopoly dominated by Etisalat (e& UAE) with about 12.9 million mobile subscribers (~61% share) and by du with about 8.2 million subscribers (~39% share; both majority government-owned). Abu Dhabi became the first capital city globally to be fully connected by fiber optics in 2011, and…
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Saudi Telecom Company (stc) accounted for about 67% of Saudi Arabia’s telecom market by revenue in Q3 2022, and held roughly 50–55% of mobile subscribers, with Mobily at 20–25% and Zain at 10–15%. The Saudi Open Access agreement in 2020 allows all six major network operators—stc, Mobily, Zain, Salam, Dawiyat, and GO Telecom—to share towers…
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Yemen’s bandwidth is dominated by a single aging subsea cable, the FALCON/FLAG system, landing at the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, with only a narrow backup via Djibouti and some satellite links. During the civil war, land fiber links to Saudi Arabia were destroyed, leaving Yemen largely dependent on undersea cables. AdenNet was launched in…
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The Ministry of Communications (MoC) controls the national fiber backbone and international gateways and leases bandwidth to private ISPs at wholesale prices around $50 per 1 Mbps. As of 2021, Iraq had about 2.1 million fixed-line/FTTH subscribers, with most of the deployment concentrated in Baghdad. Iraq has over 40 million mobile subscriptions, with 4G LTE…
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