Ericsson: Iraq is ready for mobile broadband

Ericsson has reiterated the vast, untapped potential of Iraq’s telecommunication market. Speaking at the sixth Iraq Telecom 2011, Ericsson’s Executive Vice President for Region Middle East, Tunç Yorulmaz highlighted how the Iraqi market is now ready to move towards implementing Mobile Broadband considering its saturated voice market, increasing GDP per capita and increasing internet usage rates. During the event, Yorulmaz also reiterated that this move would contribute to Ericsson’s plans for a Networked Society that has already started in the Middle East, anticipating that more than 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020 globally.
The conference took place from 25 – 27th October in Istanbul, Turkey, and gathered the industry’s most influential decision-makers and senior telecom experts as well as regional and international speakers. As a Silver sponsor, Ericsson leveraged this opportunity to highlight that the new technology implementations in Iraq can fuel the growth of the telecommunication market, and positively impact private and public businesses and government sectors, in addition to enhancing the end users’ experience.
“With the connected world that we currently live in, consumers are continuously in need of enhanced services and experiences and that’s exactly what Ericsson is constantly striving to achieve. With our goal to build a Networked Society, Ericsson is always on the lookout for new partnerships to work hand-in-hand with their customers to provide an enhanced end user experience,” said Yorulmaz.
In an effort to further develop Iraq’s telecom infrastructure and modernize and expand its network, Korek, the fastest growing mobile operator in Iraq, has recently selected Ericsson to implement a network expansion and service quality improvement project to prepare the network for 3G and LTE/4G. Through this agreement, Ericsson’s role is to deploy and integrate new radio base stations across the country and thereby provide a higher performance and a better service quality for the entire Iraqi population.
Tarek Saadi, President and Head of Ericsson North Middle East, said “The Iraqi market has great untapped potentials which are gradually being explored and utilized. As Iraqi operators are increasingly developing their networks to prepare them to 3G and LTE, we believe that it’s also time to move towards Mobile Broadband and leverage on these existing developments in order to keep up with the fast developing telecom market globally as well as regionally.”
Ericsson has been present in Iraq since November 2003 during which they were selected to supply a GSM mobile network for Korek. A year later, the company signed a contract with another GSM operator, ITPC, and due to the situation in Iraq, operations were carried out remotely from Dubai. In January 2006, Ericsson Iraq operations were combined with Ericsson Jordan at one branch office located in Amman,  and three years later in 2009 Ericsson’s Erbil office was officially inaugurated.