Why is it that with profits of Dhs2.99bn ($815m)in net profit for the second quarter this year, an increase of 37.1% on 2007 figures, that you still cannot (or will not?) provide a good customer service and internationally competitive telecom services, especially when it comes to internet connections? Why, oh why, Etisalat? I made a joke about Etisalat’s customer service to a guy I know who works in Etisalat and he just said “don’t go there…” as in he’s heard it all before. It can’t be fun working in a company like that, which is so widely disliked.
Tomorrow is the release of Firefox 3, help spread the word.
I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5. Apparently the theme we were using is not compatible so I’ve got to either fix it or find a new one. Oh well, the new version seems very nice.
A company having an FAQ on their web site is a good thing, I think, but what’s the value of it if questions are faked? I mean if a question placed in the FAQ isn’t at all frequently asked? Does it really matter or is it bad practice? The issue came up when I saw this FAQ at Cyborg IT’s web site:
A2. What new trends do you see on the Internet for 2004?
We believe 2003 - 2005 will start a new trend toward an increasing number of ‘mature’ Internet users. These ‘Baby Boomers’ are beginning to have more time available when they can sit in front of the computer and look for things that are important to them. This group of affluent adults has a significant amount of expendable dollars ready to spend on what interests them.
Now forget for a second that it’s now 2008, but think about the question. Do you really think that’s a frequently asked question? I doubt it.
Apparently a third cable supplying the Middle East and Asia with internet has been cut. Marvelous! As if two weren’t enough.
Seems things aren’t good in the Middle East when it comes to internet:
Dubai, renowned for its high-technology facilities, has seen many of its services paralyzed by an extensive Internet failure which affected much of Asia and the Middle East on Thursday.
A major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major cable failure.
Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE’s public and private sectors.
There were contradicting reports on the real cause behind the disruption, but Du, a state-owned Dubai telecom provider, attributed it to an undersea cable cut in the Mediterranean Sea between Alexandria, Egypt and Palermo, Italy.
India’s Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half by the outage, The Associated Press reported Thursday, and its lucrative outsourcing industry was seeking to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.
A Du internal memo, obtained by CNN, called the situation in Dubai “critical.”
“This will have a major impact on our voice and Internet service for all the customers,” the memo stated. “The network operation team are working with our suppliers overseas to resolve this as soon as possible.”
In a notice sent to customers, Du said the cable’s operators assured the company it was working to fix the problems quickly, but it did not know when services would be restored.
The outage led to a rapid collapse of a wide range of public services in a country which proudly promotes itself as technological pioneer.
Sources from Emirates Airlines confirmed to CNN Arabic that the outage did not affect its flight schedules — a statement which assured hundreds of travelers worried after rumors about the possibility of rescheduled flights due to the faults.
“Our flights were not affected by the current situation, and the schedules remain unchanged,” said Hatim Omar, an Emirates spokesman.
However, Dnata, a government group in charge of providing air travel services in the Middle East and ground handling services at Dubai International Airport, acknowledged facing problems because of the outage, sources from its technical department confirmed to CNN Arabic.
The outage heavily crippled Dubai’s business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars’ worth of transactions daily.
Wadah Tahah, the business strategies and development manager for state-owned construction company EMAAR, told CNN Arabic that it was fortunate the outage started Wednesday, when there had been only moderate activity in the UAE markets. He said that softened the blow to business interests.
But Tahah warned that if the outage continued, “such a situation could create problems between brokers, companies, and investors due to loss of control.”
It’s funny how you get used to having internet connection, isn’t it? During our first day or so here we were lucky enough that some neighbor had wide-open wifi available with broadband internet. That network has now disappeared. We have our Blackberries so we can do basic email and browsing through them which is great but you know they are just not any substitute for a computer for many things. So we have been to Starbucks a few times but their wifi is run by TMobile and it’s expensive: $40 per month if you want to pay month by month, $30 per month if you sign up for a year, $10 per 24 hours, or $6 for an hour.
Anyway, tomorrow they should be here to install broadband and we’ve already bought the wireless base station so we’re ready. That gives us at least two days of fast internet access here where we’re staying.
In this article, the founder of Desijaan.com, a social networking site, is described as “the latest place to go in desi entertainment” and sure enough, it has a list of torrents of what seems to be a pretty decent list of Bollywood movies. Now I’m not really debating the legality of this but rather if the GN reporter should perhaps picked up on this and asked the guy about it. The fact that it’s a self-proclaimed social networking site doesn’t get questioned by the reporter either it seems. We all know of the issues there are with social networking and connecting online, so perhaps that should have been explored further as well.
I’ve been using Pownce for a while. It’s like Twitter or Jaiku if you know then, but they have a desktop software with which you can post.
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