ALKHOBAR, 4 July 2006 — Alcatel and Dallah Telecom, an affiliate of Dallah Al-Baraka Group, and a new media licensee of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, are working with operators in the Middle East and North Africa to allow more football fans to interactively experience and enjoy the most exciting and decisive moments of the World Cup. With this solution football fans are able to receive SMS alerts on all games (goals, events, results) and MMS images and videos, browse a WAP portal with the games of the day (news, images, videos) and consult a 2002 games retrospective. The service is available in English, French and Arabic.
In this cooperation, Dallah Telecom has been providing the content and Alcatel has furnished its technical solution known as “Mobile Kiosk.” Mobile Kiosk is a full turnkey solution that allows content aggregation and service delivery in a hosted and operated mode. It has enabled Dallah Telecom to distribute its exclusive new media content of the 2006 FIFA World Cup to mobile operators in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, UAE, Sudan, Bahrain and Jordan. This is the first deployment of Alcatel’s Mobile Kiosk solution in a multi-operator, multi-country context. Addressing 25 million potential users, the project, will also increase mobile data usage in the region.
The turnkey solution provided to Dallah Telecom includes design of the services (story board, look and feel), deployment of the platforms, customization and integration with operators (SMS-C, MMS-C, WAP gateway and billing), monitoring, as well as publishing during the event. The solution is fully hosted, operated and integrated by Alcatel’s Regional Competence Center in Portugal.
In another regional move, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel company has opened a representative office at the Alcatel office based in Dubai to further raise the company’s local and regional presence. Genesys is the world’s leading provider of contact center software and provides the No. 1 open standards voice platform for contact centers. The Genesys solution range has been successful across the region with customers such as Emirates Airlines, Mobinil, National Bank of Dubai, Mobilecom Jordan, PTML Pakistan, Union Bank Pakistan, and Al-Rajhi Bank.
A recent Datamonitor survey predicting growth up to 2009 stated that there will be an average growth rate of contact center agent positions of 16.3 percent per annum in the UAE, 11.2 percent in Oman, 10.5 percent in Saudi Arabia, 7.1 percent in Egypt and 6.1 percent in Kuwait.
Call center operations depend on robust networks and Alcatel is hard at work on that front. Alcatel has been selected by Naya Tel (Pvt.) Ltd. of Pakistan to supply a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) solution to deliver a full range of high bandwidth triple play (voice, video and data) services to over 30,000 subscribers in Islamabad.
Naya Tel, an alternate service provider, is at the forefront of broadband deployment in Pakistan, and Alcatel’s fully standards compliant, all optical solution, provides Naya Tel the scalability they require to cost-effectively support their rapidly expanding network. Naya Tel is deploying the Alcatel 7340 fiber-to-the-user (FTTU) solution, along with the Alcatel 5020 Softswitch. The Alcatel 5020 Softswitch will provide Naya Tel with next generation, scalable VoIP services.
