Reports and Coverage

MEF announced the results of the 2017-2018 Board of Directors elections at the MEF Annual Members Meeting in Toronto.

Professional Communication Corporation Nedaa, the Dubai Government security networks provider, has announced that it has signed an agreement with Nokia formally designating Dubai as the headquarters of their pioneering Innovation and Creativity Lab.

Arab Advisors Group, the leading research and consulting company in MENA, launched a new set of services designed to meet the rapid changes in telecom, technology and media markets. Arab Advisors Group also adopted its new branding, which reflects the dynamic nature of the company.

Dubai is fast moving toward achieving its goal of becoming the world's first government to execute all implementable transactions on blockchain by 2020, an international expert on blockchain has said.

Corporate data is becoming what oil is to Saudi Arabia, says Clear Peak analyst Brad Cowdrey - outrageously profitable. There is so much valuable data available to corporations today, he says, and its potential uses are proliferating so rapidly that not using it would be negligent. But the dominance of tech giants that rule the data world has prompted calls for them to be broken up, the same way Standard Oil was in the early 20th century, over antitrust concerns.

Esri, the global leader in spatial analytics, is partnering with NXN (formerly neXgen), a leading smart city consulting and digital service provider in the Middle East and Africa. Through this collaboration, NXN will augment its Smart City as a Service digital platform with Esri technology to deliver geospatially enabled smart and digital services in real estate and government.

In 2015, the European Commission announced that by June 2017 mobile roaming charges would be abolished throughout the 28 nation European Union. The fall of roaming rates appears to be an international trend even in the GCC. In May, the Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) announced that roaming charges for voice calls and SMS will be further reduced from April 1 next year in a move to continuously reduce roaming charges across the region.

This edition marks the 7th anniversary of Telecom Review North America! We appreciate all of our loyal readers and advertisers and look forward to many more years to come.

French telecom giant Orange hosted the Egyptian Minister of Communications and Information Technology, HE Eng. Yasser ElKady, at its facilities in Paris, France, from July 17-18. Orange hosted the Minister to reinforce its presence in Egypt - a presence of "utmost importance" for Orange's future development in Africa and the Middle East.

Network softwarization and slicing took centre stage at a 5G workshop and demo day held in Geneva, 11 July 2017, in conjunction with a two-week series of meetings to progress the work of ITU's standardization expert group for future networks, ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13).