Wataniya Telecom hosts in Kuwait RIPE/ MENOG regional forum

Wataniya Telecom, Kuwait Red Carpet Co. hosts in Kuwait the RIPE/ MENOG regional forum which opened sessions today and ongoing until April 17th, at Marina Hotel.
The Forum gathers leading players in telecom and internet industries, in addition to representatives from governmental entities; It offers an opportunity to share experiences, discuss latest technical developments and help to learn about the technical, administration and policy issue that affect industry's organizations.

In his speech at the occasion Scott Gegenheimer, Wataniya's GM & CEO, highlighted on IP growing importance for networks due to the increasing data traffic.
He said: "IP is getting more and more prominent in every network mainly due to the data traffic increase and convergence of the transport layer. To illustrate this growth, the average daily data traffic in Wataniya's network in 2005 was 400 Gb, in 2006 it went up to 530 Gb, and last year, the 2007, it was already at 2350 Gb. The 2008 so far is getting up to 4000 Gb daily. This trend is to continue in the upcoming years with even faster pace".

Gegenheimer pointed out to Wataniya's reputation of being an innovative service provider. The company has been the first operator in the Middle East, if not in the whole world, to offer HSDPA to customers with the all you can eat service WNet. So as part of its innovation process, it has become a competitive force as an ISP in addition to a traditional mobile voice service.

Today, Wataniya is reputable as a provider who gives a high speed Internet service everywhere in Kuwait. At the same time, also other mobile operators around the world are becoming ISPs at accelerating pace. "I'm confident that RIPE will support this development by allocating the necessary IP addresses to us, to the Mobile operators in order to support this development. This is important for both the end customers as well as the operators as it allows more flexibility in designing and offering the IP based services without the need to have complex address translations between private and public addresses", commented Gegenheimer.

He added: "As Wataniya, the innovative company that prefers to challenge conventions rather than following them, we don't want to copy the traditional ISP's approaches. We are building new business models, with new approaches, delivering the value of mobile internet to our customers who are always put first. We have successfully introduced a WMail, the mobile email service, to the Kuwaiti market several years ago. Especially for our business customers, we have just launched a service called WPro-Link, enabling a real time data communication as well as total point-to-point connection, and other highly sophisticated features using our mobile network".

16/4/2008