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TRA Publishes Bahrain’s Internet Ecosystem Report (by Renesys)

Elyas Kashfi / July 3, 2012 / Bahrain, Internet / Permalink

The TRA of Bahrain has published a mid year report about Bahrain's Internet environment (or ecosystem). This report was compiled by Renesys, Internet intelligence experts. If you are into networking or would like to know more how your Internet at home is routed then you'll enjoy reading it.

Download it from the TRA here.

Some interesting points:

STC (aka Viva) is providing most of the upstream to providers across the country (66% of traffic going through them). This is good because STC in Saudi Arabia transit with MANY connectivity providers (Level 3, Tinet, Tata amongst others).
Many ISPs are have now single-homed to STC or BIX.
The bad, Bahrain is the ONLY country in the GCC that does not have a single IPv6 network…

Hopefully the next report will contain some information about newcomer Greenisis.

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Bahrain’s New “Green” ISP

Elyas Kashfi / February 27, 2012 / Bahrain, Internet, News / Permalink

Within the coming months Bahrain will have a new ISP joining the market. The company will be called Greenisis and they already have a website up (a teaser for now). They are joining the green technology marketing trend since they will be using low emission equipment (hopefully no compromise on quality). They are backed by a company known as Kleos that "is a Telecommunications Company specialized in designing, building and operating the world's most advanced wireless mobile broadband access networks" (Kleos home page).

"Greenisis" appears to be a trade name for the actual company that is running Greenisis: Bahrain Broadband Co. W.L.L. (according to its TRA licence info). The IP address running the Greenisis website belongs to Nuetel (AS35568), that also provides Internet to Amwaj, not sure how they are related though. Most importantly, if true, this means that Bahrain is one of the first countries running "green broadband" and the first in the region.

Fingers crossed for truly unlimited Internet like our neighboring countries !

GDN article about the launch.
ITP article about Bahrain Broadband's winning bid.

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TRA Releases Market Indicators for 2011

Elyas Kashfi / January 30, 2012 / Bahrain, Technology / Permalink

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (aka TRA) of Bahrain has today released market indicators covering the period between the last quarter of 2010 to 2011. It is quite an interesting read, especially since it covers an important period of time in Bahrain. Some of the information that may be found in this report are: market trends, telecoms revenue, telecoms employment and overview of different services amongst others. It may be downloaded from the TRA's website here.

Here are some of the stuff I found interesting:

The mobile market provides 44% of market revenue. Followed by international calls (23%), Internet services are before last at only 13%.
The telecoms market represented 4.4% of GDP in 2010.
There are 2,600 direct jobs in the telecoms market (2010). I thought it was much more! I'm guessing outsourcing does not count since it might be a market of "services"?
By the end of 2011 there were 1.7 million mobile subscribers. That's 133% of penetration.
Due to Viva's calls offer, minutes increased by 86% in 2010.
Blackberry represents only 6% of the market. 99% of my friends and family are in these 6%….!
Broadband penetration in 2011 was 23%.
Mobile broadband consists of 44% of the broadband market.
A whopping 95% of households have broadband! The estimates of other countries for 2012 is: South Korea (97%), Netherlands (82%) and the US (77%).
22,000 (22 thousand) numbers have been ported between providers since MNP (Mobile Number Portability) was launched in July 2011.

Much more can be found in the report. Get it here.

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TRA Publishes Consumer Protection Guidelines

Elyas Kashfi / December 29, 2011 / Bahrain / Permalink

I thought it would be a good idea to post this for those who are not subscribed to TRA's email newsletters. They have published an updated consumer protection guidelines document, covering its purpose to what competitors should not do to consumers.

You may find it here: http://www.tra.bh/en/pdf/ConsumerProtectionGuidelinesEnglishFinal.pdf

In case you want to subscribe to their newsletter, visit http://www.tra.bh/en/registration.asp (or if you are on their homepage, look for the "Register" button right next to the "Use Your Mobile Wisely" banner).

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