Rise of the UAE's telecoms industry

The UAE recently celebrated its 40th anniversary - an occasion that should also be cause for cheer among local telecoms executives.

In the 1970s, telecoms subscribers were measured in the thousands, rather than the millions of today.

Back when the Union was formed, there were of course no mobile telephones - and only the most privileged homes were connected by landline.

Today, the country boasts an advanced 4G wireless broadband network, along with one of world's highest mobile-subscriber rates.

Ray Hassan, the president of the telecoms infrastructure firm Ericsson in the Middle East, said that the handset of choice back in 1971 was an analogue phone with rotary dial. It was a far cry from the iPhones of today.

"There were a few tens of thousands of homes connected with a fixed-line analogue home phone. It was quite a privilege to have a telephone at that time," said Mr Hassan.

"Somewhere around the mid-1970s there were about 30,000 to 40,000 homes that were connected," he added.

The British company Cable & Wireless, which traces its history back to the 1860s, was one of the main telecoms providers when the UAE was formed in 1971.

Several other companies were also operating, before their amalgamation in 1976 under the Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, or 'Emirtel'.

In a clue to the scale of its operations, Emirtel opened a new telephone exchange in Ras Al Khaimah in April 1977. It had 2,500 lines, and replaced an older exchange that had a capacity of just 750 lines.

Mr Hassan said that most of the 40,000-odd landline phones in the 1970s would have been in the fledgling cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But wooden telegraph poles also carried the network to more rural locations, he said.

"There was probably one household in the village that had a fixed-line phone," he said. "If you wanted to contact someone somewhere, you would arrange a time."

It was not until the summer of 1984 that Emirtel was renamed 'Etisalat', in a response to a decree that all state establishments must have Arabic names.

At the time, Ericsson was working on the digitisation of the nation's telephone network, a precursor to the modern technology of today.

"We've been in the region for almost 100 years, starting in Egypt," said Mr Hassan. "Our first activities [in the UAE] really started in the early 1980s, when we won a large contract with Etisalat to modernise the old analogue systems and introduce digital telephony."

Today, the UAE has one of the highest rates of mobile-phone use globally, with an average of two SIM cards per person. Etisalat launched its high-speed 4G mobile broadband network earlier this year, and its rival Du - which launched commercial services in 2007 - has boosted competition in the sector.

"The UAE as such is probably one of the most advanced and most highly developed markets in the world," said Mr Hassan. "We believe that a lot of the development in the country is directly linked to telecoms, broadband penetration and connectivity."

Other telecoms providers agreed. "The UAE was the first country in the Middle East to establish a mobile network in 1982," said Igor LePrince, the head of Middle East region at Nokia Siemens Networks.

"Undoubtedly, information and communication technologies are one of the key economic platforms for the UAE's economic growth," he added.