R8: Middle East/North Africa

The Communication Infrastructure and the Internet Services as a Base

Kamel, Tarek ( tkamel@ritsec.com.eg)

Baki, Nashwa Abdel ( nashwa@frcu.eun.eg)

Abstract

Introduction

This paper gives an overview about the communication and networking infrastructure as a base for a Regional Information Highway. It reflects the presentations and discussions held during the workshop "The Regional Information Highway" in Cairo in November 1994. The paper starts with an overview about the data communication infrastructure and describes the Internet services in the region.

It highlights the experiences and lessons learnt in the different countries and concludes with some technical future plans and recommendations for a strucutred regional information highway.

This data communication infrastructure is very heterogeneous in the Arab Region. To present this infrastructure in an overview we will divide the Arab region in subregion and take one or two representative countries from each subregion.

The North African Region will be represented by Marocco and Tunisia, while the central Arab region has Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The Gulf area will be represented by U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia. These countries can be considered ready for Information highway activities.

The dial-up data communication connectivity is available with satisfactory performance in all the above mentioned countries. The infrastructure in this aspect varies from most up to date technology in UAE with complete digital facilities to less developed facilities in the rest of the countries. The PSTN is highly used for data communication in some countries while in other countries a PDN is also available. The PDN has the best data communication services with ISDN, frame relay and X.25 services. Other countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Marocco, Saudi Arabia and Syria do also have X.25 networks with variable speeds from 9.6kb/sec to 64 kb/sec. They do all have international access with digitial submarine and satellite channels with speeds up to E1 to Europe and the states. The conlusion is that the data communication infrastrucuture has suitable facilities to start national information highways in the different countries. There is a need like in Egypt, Syria and Jordan that the data communication facilities should cover a wider range of their territories. The intercountry data communication infrastructure needs to be upgraded as well. SEMEWE-2 optical fibre cable is already a good support in that direction to link the Central Arab Region with the Gulf Area. More efforts should be done for higher speed connectivity between the Central Arab region and North Africa.

For the infostructure this paragraph highlights the main information services in the above mentioned countries. A special focus will be put on the Internet services. Egypt is providing a number of value added information services in the area of S&T;, Education, Trade as well as Internet services. The full Internet services with email, gopher, and WWW servers are available in the academic, governmental and commercial sector in Egypt in the Egyptian Universities Network and IDSC/RITSEC. Tunisia has also full Internet services in the academic sector with gopher and WWW servers via RNRT. Kuwait, Algeria and Marocco have also operational Internet domains with email services. Common problems which faced the different countries in the region while introducing the Internet services can be summarized as follows:

• Cultural problems include that the networking environment should be open to the rest of the world completely. This step of open doors is not completely accepted in all socities in the region.
• The language barrier as the various Internet applications need to be arabized with a standard code, while this procedure is expected to take some time.
• The Internet services are faced with some resistance due to the large amount of unstructured information. There is a need to help some users in some subjects to navigate some strucutred way.

• Build on the existing facilities of PSTN for a wide range of coverage and upgrade the digital data communication facilities in Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
• Create clusters in the different subregions and upgrade the inter-regional communication with higher speed data pipelines. (e.g. Central Arab region and North Africa). This makes the different subregions share and optimize the use of available higher speed interregional and international digital data pipelines
• Provide attention to the standardization of arabized value added application and services
• Train the user community to live in an open networking environment with a lot of conflicting but still coexisting opinions.
• Help other countires to establish full Internet services in their countries.