Zain Group today announced the signing of a three-year US$700 million revolving credit facility to meet the company’s short to medium term funding needs for general corporate purposes.

Al Khalij Commercial Bank, Ahli United Bank, Arab Bank, Emirates NBD Capital Limited, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Qatar National Bank Group and Standard Chartered Bank acted as the mandated lead arrangers. Standard Chartered Bank and QNB Group also acted as joint coordinators. QNB Group is the facility agent.

In recent years Zain has invested heavily in upgrading its mobile networks and in rolling out new services across all its operations. Most recently, the company introduced 4G LTE broadband services to several key markets namely Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain as well as extensively upgrading and expanding networks in Iraq, Jordan, Sudan and South Sudan.

Intel Corporation and Etisalat Misr have announced the launch of the Middle East’s first smartphone with Intel Inside, the new Etisalat E-20 smartphone. The Etisalat E-20 smartphone is targeted at the growing number of smartphone buyers in the Middle East and North Africa region. In Egypt alone there are more than 91 million mobile subscribers and mobile penetration has increased to 116.94 per cent.

The handset will be available at all Etisalat stores across Egypt, and is equipped with the Intel Atom Z2420 processor with Intel Hyper-Threading technology that can achieve speeds of up to 1.2GHz. The powerful device offers consumers fast web browsing, impressive multimedia capabilities and a great Android applications experience.

The device is housed in a compact design and features a 3.5-inch touchscreen display for crisp text and images, support for FM radio and an expandable memory slot for greater flexibility, and HSPA+ modem support with Intel’s XMM 6265 modem for global roaming.

Alcatel-Lucent has been selected by Du to build the second phase of a high-speed 100G coherent optical transport network (OTN) throughout the UAE.

The new optical transport network will enable the UAE telco to dramatically boost the speed and capacity of its existing network, and thanks to the efficiency of OTN sub-wavelength grooming, it will support the booming explosion of data traffic generated by the proliferation of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in the most economical way.

Du will use Alcatel-Lucent’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) to address the booming demand for high-bandwidth data services such as high-definition video streaming, next-generation mobile broadband applications and cloud services.

Network capacity and performance will be significantly boosted by taking advantage of unique Bell Labs silicon innovations to support data speeds of 100 gigabits-per-second on each of the 88 wavelengths.

Etisalat Group reported a 17 per cent increase in revenue year-on-year in Q1 to end-March 2013, reaching AED 9.6 billion (US$2.62 billion). Operating profit for the period before federal royalty amounted to AED3.98 billion, while consolidated net profit post federal royalty amounted to AED1.825 billion, up one per cent year-on-year.

Revenue from the Pakistan operations was included in consolidated figures for the first time.

Etisalat reported that its aggregated subscriber base reached 141 million at the end of Q1, having added 18 million net users during the year, with the additions representing a growth rate of 15 per cent.

Northern Iraq-based communications provider, Regional Telecom is set to launch the country’s inaugural 4G LTE network by mid-May this year. It is a historic milestone in the development of Iraq’s communications infrastructure, and would not have been successful without the partnership with Alcatel-Lucent

Kawa Junad, the chairman of Regional Telecom, sees a number of public sector services such as health and education benefiting from the roll out of LTE in Northern Iraq

Continue reading →