March 5, 2009, 3:56 pm
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
By Stephen Farrell
A colleague flew into Baghdad last week, and his pocket started buzzing before he left the airport. He had accidentally left his Blackberry on, and, for the first time ever, it was working in Iraq.
Delivering real estate lists from New York, to be precise. He is buying an apartment there – which is why he needs a holiday in Baghdad – and his realtor was sending him emails.
He was still shaking his head a couple of hours later as he drove into the Baghdad Bureau. Only six years ago digital communications were all but non-existent in Iraq.
When I visited during Saddam Hussein’s era there were no cellphones, precious few working international landlines and only half a dozen internet cafes in Baghdad where you could send emails.
At each center you had to hand in your identity card so Big Brother had a register of who exactly was working on which computer terminal at which time. But that was for internet, emails were not monitored, the man at the desk assured me. Great, can I send an email? Certainly, sir. Just leave your identity papers with us and proceed to computer terminal number five. Hmm.
Of course the lines went straight through to a goon at mukhabarat central, and of course many foreign websites couldn’t be accessed. To experiment I typed in some words that I knew would be prohibited.
The screen went really rather red, really rather quickly. It was the only time during my entire visit that I saw fear on the face of my - compulsory - regime-appointed “minder.” “Mr. Farrell, it is my identity card they have, not yours,” he said, twitching. But of course he was “they,” just a different branch of “they.”
Who watches the watcher is not a question you ever bothered to ask in Saddam’s Iraq. Everyone.
Fast forward to April 2003. The last days of Saddam’s regime, American forces well on their way into the outskirts of Baghdad but Saddam’s border guards are - annoyingly - still manning their posts at the Jordanian-Iraqi border.
Satellite dishes and handheld satellite phones were the only things that could make an international call in Iraq, independent of the state-controlled land and satellite phones. So I had one stuffed into my underpants. Not a dish, obviously. But still it made walking tricky.
Thankfully the border guards were distracted by the presence of a pulchritudinous blonde American network television correspondent in the car in front of me, so paid no attention to my trousers.
These satellite phones were a godsend. It was easy to find journalists in Iraq back then. They were either walking around shouting, “Can you hear me, Can you hear me?” into their hands, or were being followed like a Pied Piper by a trail of American soldiers and displaced Iraqis who wanted to borrow it “just for one minute” to phone home.
Soon after that in 2003 came the first American cellphones which worked in Iraq. They were an anomaly, operating on the American 1-prefix international code, and were only issued to a prestigious few Iraqi politicians, American diplomats and soldiers. It was an instant status symbol, a real mark of who was in and who was out.
For everyone else, the remainder of 2003 was dishes and Thuraya handhelds. Thieves did a brisk trade whipping simcards from phones, substituting them with fakes and running up thousands of dollars in calls.
It was a beautiful scam, almost a victimless crime because the service was usually so bad anyway that the victim didn’t know he was a victim. For the first few days he just assumed that he couldn’t
get through because satellite coverage was down. Or the system was overloaded. Or someone was jamming because they were about to raid somewhere and didn’t want the people who already knew to know.
Some time in the early days there was a brief window of cellular opportunity when everyone’s American or European cellphones jumped into life for a day or two as the Kuwaiti network mysteriously became available, even as far north as Baghdad.
Westerners joked that it meant Iraq was now the 19th province of Kuwait, reversing the outcome of the 1990 invasion. How we laughed. How the Iraqis didn’t. It only lasted a few days.
In February 2004 the first commercial network arrived, which made life much easier. The connections were very unreliable, as insurgents kept pulling down all the masts either for sabotage or to melt them down into fake simcards, or whatever.
They still are unreliable – one of the most common roadside advertisements is of an apoplectic Iraqi looking at his cellphone with a mixture of disgust and vessel-rupturing fury.
But now the Blackberries are working. And they are selling iPhones in the shops. First generation, but still.
Personally, I prefer the new handset with two simcards. And my Blackberrying colleague?
He just got an email. Spam. Progress.
-
Zen is the name of one of the main cell phone network company in Iraq. The word Zen means good. The name of the company is really attractive and gives a very good impression about the company but reality is completely different. The company which provides the communication services to most of the Iraqi provinces is one of the worst companies in the world. To call a friend, you have to try for more than two or three times and when you get him or her, don't expect to hear the voice because mostly the caller hears noise and strange sounds and all you get is loosing money from your credit.
The company has a contract with the ministry of finance. One of the main points that had been mentioned in the joint press conference of the company with the ministry, the general director of the company confirmed that the company will provide the best quality of services to Iraqis. It looks that the man meant (the best worse services). People complain always and many TV channels made many reports about the services of the company. The ministry of finance announced it had fined the company and informed it to improve its services but the services got even worse.
Day after day, Zen company proves it doesn't provide anything really ZEN but the name and the favor is for the very ZEN administrational corruption
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment