Cue Another Farce?

Two cellphone SIM cards (bottom and top) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Did  you catch this one? I, for one, didn't I've missed it until I finally tumbled today.

The UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) last week launched a new campaign, 'My number, my identity'. It's probably my fault and certainly not the almost impenetrably obtuse language of the announcement which is clarified by Gulf News today in a story that, try as I might, I could not find online.

We're all going to have to trot off and re-register our mobile SIMs with whichever operator we're with. From July 17th, Etisalat will have over 100 registration points around the country where you can go, eagerly clutching your national ID or passport with visa, and complete an application form to, effectively, re-apply for your mobile phone number. Du didn't confirm its re-registration arrangement intentions to GN in order to make the story, but CEO Osman Sultan, quoted in the TRA release lauding the TRA's campaign, did say customers could go to Du shops.

Many of you will recognise July 17th as the likely starting point for Ramadan, the ideal time to conduct a national campaign of this sort.

Unregistered SIM cards will be cancelled "once the registration period expires" according to the GN story. We haven't been told when that is, or what likely timescale they have in mind.

There are 12.36 million mobile lines out there. It's taken five years for the Emirates ID Authority to 'roll out' the national ID card. How long will it take this campaign I wonder? How many needless frustrations, queues, visits to physical locations and extended deadlines, empty threats, retracted announcements and 'clarifications' are we set to see?

But believe me folks, take this one seriously and get in there early. Because if there's one thing these bohos can do well, it's cut people off...

The UAE BlackBerry Ban: Barmy

Image via Wikipedia

Why does all the fun happen when I'm away? Woke up today to the news that the UAE is to block BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry E-mail and BlackBerry web-browsing following a ruling by telecom regulator the TRA.

Gulf News online reports the story, which WAM broke today as far as I can see from over here. The National's story is here. Etisalat has made a statement which includes the immortal words, "BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organisation."

Oh, the LOLs, from a country where all requests to browse the web are immediately referenced to, errr, foreign, commercial organisations. Unless something's changed since the McAfee acquisition, US security company Secure Computing used to parse all searches to make sure that we weren't being exposed to all the naughtiness and stuff that's out there. We weren't so shy about 'foreign commercial organisations' then, were we folks?

BlackBerry customers were, infamously, not subject to the arbitrary restrictions of the block list. Many will remember the furore that erupted, extensively discussed on this very blog, which appeared to be a muckle-headed attempt on the part of the Telco That Likes To Say Ugh, Etisalat, to cludge security software intended for other purposes into an attempt to introduce surveillance and monitoring capabilities to the otherwise hard to intercept BB.


It's interesting for telecom regulation watchers that the customer is to be harmed extensively as a result of this move by a regulator, a class of organisation that is everywhere in the world tasked with holding the customers interests as one of its primary goals. The Telcos are being forced to breach their compact with their users (The vast majority of people bought BlackBerrys precisely with this very functionality as their primary reason for buying in) and tens of thousands of devices have been rendered basically unfit for purpose overnight.

I look forward to this move being 'clarified'. As it stands, it's yet another attempt to bomb ourselves back into the digital stone age. The madness of it all is that nothing has changed about the BlackBerry or the way in which the device works - and nothing has changed (correct me, please, if I'm wrong) in the 'moral and cultural' environment, or indeed the regulatory environment, since the BB was first introduced to the UAE - it has always worked using the company's own servers which underpinned the very services that CrackBerry users find so very appealing. If you can't live with it now - you shouldn't have sold it to us back then.

Will customers be offered refunds for the now barely functional hunks of black and chrome plastic they hold in their hands? Or will Etisalat and Du be offering free plastic covers that say 'I am browsing happily. Carry on as normal.'???

PS: In a move that appears to highlight that this move is being prompted by security concerns more than anything else, WAM has published an odd document that purports to 'compare the existing telecom regulations of the US, UK and UAE' but which is actually something of a 'dossier' that appears intended to justify the idea that a regulator can just turn around and delete a service being accessed by tens of thousands of consumers. It's a long read, but it's here.

Right. I'm going back on holiday...

Blockheads Reprised

It would appear that the UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (Or TRA to you an' me) has blocked YouTube's age verification screen.

The problem was highlighted on Twitter yesterday when a link to the now infamous 'Sheikh Zayed Road Madness' video was shared - the link came back with the blocked splash screen on both Etisalat and Du networks. A good link is, BTW, here.

Although the first assumption is that the block was because of the nature of the content, which is a group of nutters endangering the lives of motorists on Dubai's busiest road by pulling doughnuts and the like, this was not in fact the case

(Dubai's police website still allows you, rather charmingly, to key in number plates and get a record of fines and the like without requiring any corroborating evidence that it is, in fact, your own plate you're looking up. So you can look up these chaps' driving history if you want.)

What had happened was the video had been flagged for age restriction (you can't actually tag a video with an age limit on YouTube when you post it, it has to be 'flagged' and a YouTube staffer will review and age restrict the video) and therefore viewers were sent to the YouTube Age Verification Page.

And THAT is the bit that had been blocked. One can only assume that 'if you need to be asked, the answer's no' is the policy in place here.

Helpfully, Etisalat's Twitter Twit suggested to me that YouTube itself was responsible for the block, which is patently not the case, and then referred me to YouTube's Terms of Service which, of course, are totally irrelevant to the point in question.

Have you read YouTube's TOS? Here. Fill yer boots. Bet you can't finish it without going mad.

In the meantime, we await the results of the investigation that is being conducted, I am sincerely advised, into whether it is morally or culturally reprehensible to answer the question: "Are you over 21?"

BlockBerries

Image via Wikipedia

So Etisalat and Du have put their heads together and decided to block the evil BlackBerries. From this day on, no longer will the UAE's population be able to access gambling, pornography,drugs and *gasp* Voice over IP sites.

It's interesting that the telcos rank VOIP alongside gambling and porn - an insight into telco morality, if you like. What are the worst things the UAE's telcos can think of - the most mind-corrupting, society-challenging, youth-destabilising things possible? And Skype is right up there with the worst things that the Lord of Mordor could possibly imagine.

You do have to wonder, don't you? The telcos, according to the report carried in The Paper That Tells It Like It Is, Gulf News, are acting unilaterally and not waiting for 'Nanny' regulator the TRA. Damn right they are - because while three of the four categories are culturally arguable, the fourth, VOIP, is a purely commercial decision that is contrary to the interests of the people that these telcos are supposed to be serving.

At least they're not forcing people to accept spyware...

The Inconvenient Truth

Image via Wikipedia

‘Dark side of Dubai’ journalist Johann Hari made much of the reaction to his article in The Independent when he put up a piece on the influential Huffington Post recently, playing the ‘poor mouth’ and using the overblown language that caused Dubai blogger Chris Saul to coin the ‘transgression too far’ mini-meme that had so many of us howling with laughter at the pompous hack’s expense.

The Dubai authorities have decreed that the article must not be read says Hari in his post, written and placed carefully up on the Internet when he knew perfectly well that the ban was not a policy decision, was not total by any means and was clearly not an official act. All facts made clear in the blog post by The National’s Jen Gerson he links to as proof of his banning.

Any honest man would have waited to see what the outcome of this clearly confused and idiotic situation was before screaming ban. But not Hari.

He links to Jen’s post as ‘one of many bloggers’ who have been discussing the ban. In fact, only two blogs have discussed the ban – mine and Jen's. If anyone knows of any others please do let me know. Mine, of course – the post that first exposed the daft Du block - is critical of The Great Hari and so wouldn't get linked to.

Hari also makes the assertion in his Huff post that he has also been told that he would be arrested or turned away at the airport if he came back to Dubai.

Who told him that? Does he really think he figures so large in the scheme of things that his name’s on every national immigration computer ready for the day that he comes back to save us once again? Is that an official response to him or a warning from a credible source? Or just another empty assertion intended to demonstrate how damaging The Great Man’s Truth has been to this evil and morally corrupt state?

It’s an example of the way that Johann Hari treats the truth – anything that doesn’t fit his purpose is quietly dropped from his skewed and distorted accounts. And that includes balance. The inconvenient truths, that his piece was not banned as a policy decision, that the ban was not called for, let alone authorised at any government level, that the Dubai authorities have decreed nothing of the sort and that it is highly unlikely that anyone could be arsed to arrest him, are missing from his Huffington assertions. As is the very likely scenario - that 'authority' here would have been mildly horrified at Du for trying to block the piece at all.

But then there’d be no piece to demonstrate to the world that Johann Hari, scourge of the unjust and bearer of the torch of truth, is important enough to ban, would there?

And that, one suspects, would be a transgression too far...

The Du Fail

Image by Fenchurch! via Flickr

A wee while ago I posted a grumpy response to the campaign being run by the UAE’s second favourite telco, Du, which targeted ‘smart people’ using social media tools, including Twitter and Facebook.

As I said at the time, and yes I do know that quoting myself is dangerously close to bloganism, “The first problem with this whole thing is that you need to be UPFRONT if you're a company using Twitter and other social media. There's no point in being coy - and you're just going to annoy people if you hide your identity and purpose.”

There was quite a lot of negative comment generally about the campaign, particularly on Twitter.

The campaign didn’t actually last very long. In fact, it looked like this:

Smartpeople follower stats

31 March - FB 46 members (13 admins), Twitter 81 followers (following 192)

6 April FB 116 members (13 admins), Twitter 127 followers (following 226)

13 April FB 184 (15 admins), Twitter 138 (226)

14 May - Twitter 152 Facebook 250

18 May - Twitter 152 Facebook 252

Last Tweet from @smartpeople was 19 April

Last post on Facebook page by 'Albert Edison' was 12 April


One can only assume that at some stage, someone smart pulled the plug. But then if there were actually smart people at Du, you’d have thought they wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

You’d be wrong.

Du’s new campaign, Be Heard, is similar to the last effort in that its ‘social media’ platforms are being heavily supported by traditional advertising spend. The drive to get you along to the beheard.ae website included emailers as well as muppies (the street advertising thingies).

When you get to beheard.ae you get asked to answer a load of questions of the ‘empowering’ nature: you know, ‘Do you want better value?’ ‘Do you want to save your time?’ ‘Do you want fries with that?’

The website is basically a ‘bait and switch’ advertising-led concept, getting you to visit a website ostensibly to ‘be heard’ when the objective is actually to position Du as cool and ‘with the kids’, to collect email addies and ‘profiles’ of people.

The site tells you how many people voted yes or no to each of the questions. With an attempt to build a Twitter following and an add to Facebook button, the whole thing could be termed an attempt at building ‘social media’ in that it fakes the egalitarianism of asking people’s opinions and letting them share the feedback.

You get the option of adding your own question for people to answer. Someone I know added ‘Don’t you think this whole dumb campaign is a waste of time?’ but I haven’t seen that one displayed on the site yet. So much for the democratisation of being heard.

The feeling of mildly frustrated emptiness that is the end result of going through this process is a little like going out for evening drinks with friends except you have to mime drinking instead of having real drinks and you have to bray like donkeys instead of actually talking.

There’s an ‘about’ button on the site. Once again, as with the failed Smartpeople campaign, that button doesn’t actually say that the campaign’s being run by Du.

The conversation about this campaign on Twitter has either been breathless endorsement (by the people behind it) or irritated commentary. Few managed to voice their irritation as well as advertising website AdNation:

“This one actually manages to be worse than Smart People – at least that had some kind of gimmick. Beheard.ae seems to just be a rather fatuous series of questions, which offer no real insight into anything.”

So again, we have an anonymous site that pretends to be social media and simply isn’t – it’s a company behaving dishonestly and completely misreading the sentiment of the target audience it’s addressing. It’s a company trying to use ‘social media’ but from an old school advertising standpoint, informed by the belief that the job of an advertiser is to shout slogans at people and the role of the consumer is to be the helpless victim of the sloganeering.

The site asks a range of questions, but that’s as far as it goes. They’re not discussed, they’re not part of a serious feedback scheme or the basis for a conversation. I can’t wait for the press release which I am sure, with a crushing sense of inevitability, will be sent out with the ‘results of the survey’.

The result of all this money and effort is that consumers (particularly the Twittering ones) have been actively sniping at the campaign, mildly irritated by it or simply untouched by it.

I believe passionately that we should all make mistakes. Like some geezer said, ‘If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not innovating’. But repeating dumb mistakes, particularly when people actually explained the mistake and why it was a mistake, is a worry.

These two campaigns have arguably done more damage than good to the Du brand.

What's next? Will it be strike three?

Be honest with consumers.

Talk with people, not at them.

Stop shouting and start listening.

Get the message, Du?

(Thanks to CJ for obsessive monitoring & input)

How smart are you?

How smart are you?

An idle click on a new Twitter follower message as I contemplated the second coffee of the morning led me to this Tweet:

"We launched the project site http://www.smartpeople.ae this is going to be revolutionary!"

There was something familiar about this. Maybe it was the over-excited tone, maybe the the lack of punctuation. Maybe the over-promising - 'this is going to be revolutionary'?

Really?

And then we have the Twitter ID - 'Albert Edison'. I smell ad agency.

The site's borderline slick, copywriter schtick with smart graphical treatment, some neat ideas, a Twitter feed and even a link to 'Our Facebook Page' that doesn't work. And yes, it's an 'integrated social media campaign' from someone. Ths is undoubtedly a company and a site driven by an ad agency - the 'feel' is unmistakeable.

But who?

You see, the first problem with this whole thing is that you need to be UPFRONT if you're a company using Twitter and other social media. There's no point in being coy - and you're just going to annoy people if you hide your identity and purpose.

And that's precisely what UAE telco Du has done with this campaign. 'About us' on the website doesn't say, 'Hi, we're du and this is our new campaign site'. In fact, nowhere on the site says 'Hi, we're du and this is our new campaign site'.

So no, I didn't think your idea was smart - I was mildly annoyed that you'd wasted my time and misrepresented yourselves to me, actually - and that you're crashing around 'social media' having learned none of the lessons of Wal-Mart et al.

Wise up, people.

THIS IS NOT A ONE WAY COMMUNICATION ANY MORE!

Update. The Facebook page is now working.

Just in case anyone out there doesn't know this, you can look up any UAE registered (any .ae domain) website and find out who owns it by using the UAE NIC WHOIS tool.

You can do the same with .com sites by using whois.com.

Stealth

With the car in the shop and Al Habtoor getting ready to take a significant chunk out of me in return for the usual skimdisksreplacebrakepads experience, I'm travelling to work this morning with Mr. G. and about a million other poor bastards. Sharjah is gridlocked and there are roadworks every which way you go. It's madness. However, it's an ill wind and all that - a two hour journey gave us plenty of time to catch up on the arms trade (Pakistan is apparently awash in Rs10,000 AK47s, compared to an ex-factory price ten times that), murdered Lebanese starlets and, of course, what's new in taxi-land.

Although I thought, given the number of conversations I've had with Mr G. on the subject, that I had a relatively good grounding on the iniquities of the transport companies, I didn't know, for instance, that the drivers are forced to go to the taxi company's own garage for minor repairs and pay for them themselves at rates fixed by the company. As the company garage is operated as a profit centre in its own right, drivers are finding that these simple repairs are coming with a pretty hefty price tag.

This, surely, is yet another classic example of the fact that these drivers are, in fact, indentured labour.

Mr G is also quite gleeful with his new mobile: operator Du apparently gave the taxi company 1,200 SIMs for the drivers and Mr. G. is delighted at the per-second billing as he makes a load of short duration calls such as 'I am outside the villa now, Sir' and the like.

Personally I'm less than impressed with this stealth marketing. Not only are they giving the damn things away now, they've kiboshed the Du Test with my taxi driver!!! Grrr!!!

Spanked

Gulf News today carries, on page 41, a slightly strange advertisement for telco Du’s Unlimited Blackberry offer. The ad, which struck me as unusually weak in a market slopping over the brim with weak advertising, offers “unlimited wireless access to email, calendar, messaging and internet through seamless and secured office connectivity”. It features a sketch of two aliens looking amazed at a Blackberry, having discarded a number of other useless gadgets.

Unusually, Gulf News has also, on page 36, spanked the offer editorially. GN’s Nadia Saleem not unreasonably points out that the ‘unlimited’ Du offer is actually limited to 1 Gb of data transfer, after which usage is charged at Dhs 0.01 per kbyte (or, in other words, a cool Dhs 10 per Mbyte). When contacted about the fact that its ‘unlimited’ offer is actually limited (a slightly paradoxical thing, I’m sure most would agree), Du apparently told our Nadia, “someone might use the data access facility to download movies all day or use the mobile as a modem to transfer large amounts of data”.

Ooh! The rotters!

Firstly, the point is surely that in today's 'always on' world, the data volume is not the charged unit in the vast majority of internet transactions. Package prices are the way forward and the amount of data used in a given package is not germane. The internet is not circuit switched - you pays for the pipe - access not volume. Operators billing volumetrically for access are sort of cheating, really. Particularly when they have mobile IP infrastructures.

That apart, I personally received something like 250Mbytes of useful* email this month, despite being on leave for three weeks of it - and the month's not over yet. If I include the junk, we're looking at a mailbox of over 300 Mbytes and I haven't started allowing for internet access, streaming video or any other cool apps or toys. So it's actually conceivable that a heavy user would actually want 1Gb of access.

What’s missing here are a few words on their advertisement to explain that they don’t actually mean unlimited when they say unlimited. Perhaps interestingly, Etisalat, the big telco, doesn’t limit its unlimited offer.

I bet the GN advertising sales boys aren’t talking to our Nads today, though...


PS: I know I said I wasn't posting for a couple of days, but I couldn't resist it...

*Useful is a relative term.

Grumpy

A very grumpy little pair of pieces in today’s Gulf News: the ‘phone company that everyone loves to shout at, Etisalat, has released a new block of numbers starting with the prefix 056 and hasn’t bothered telling anyone, according to the paper which gives the grievance front page space (alongside a report of the horrific crash that happened yesterday on the Sheikh Zayed Road outside the Grand Hyatt: a minibus jumped the central barrier and hit an oncoming car with the loss of five lives) and then repeats the story inside.

The source of at least some of GN’s grumpiness is given away in the story, “repeated requests by Gulf News for a comment from etisalat went unanswered”, and then GN gets its revenge, continuing with “Etisalat subscribers regularly complain about the poor customer support.”

Ouch.

The GN story is hung on a single subscriber complaint, which is a tad thin if you ask me. Australian businessman Irshad says he's been given a new number and is facing constant problems with people insisting they’ve got the number wrong. The paper says that ‘apart from a press release’ there has been no attempt at raising awareness of the new number: that press release, as far as I can see, went out in August 2006!!!

Changing a national numbering scheme without any attempt at public awareness is an odd decision to make. Choosing to ignore media enquiries about it an even odder one, particularly given that Etisalat is involved, at least nominally, in a competitive market. The result would appear to be some unwelcome coverage given unusual prominence, I would submit precisely because the company has been ignoring the newspaper's requests.

You can only conclude that there’s a potent cocktail of stupidity and arrogance at work here and that’s surprising given the vast number of very positive changes that have been taking place over at Etisalat towers over the past couple of years.

This news is also bad news for a completely different reason: it’s the death knell for the Du test, because people are going to start asking for the ‘full’ mobile number including the prefix now.

Mind you, I have to confess I’ll be delighted if people start asking “Is that 050 or 056?”...

:)

Dosh

Many years ago I had occasion to interview Andrew Hearn, then the boss of Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco to you, mate). He was a great interview, speaking precisely and pretty much laying it on the line.

One thing he said that really stuck in my mind, and has done up until the present day, was: "Alexander, you have to understand. Only a complete fool can lose money in telecommunications."

Someone hasn't told this lot that...

So they announced they've got 1.75 million users, of which 1.4 million are 'active'. This is the first we've seen the distinction made: certainly not a distinction made when they announced they'd crossed the million (which prompted me to invent The Du test, if you will recall). If you take the 1.4 million figure, that's a loss of Dhs 44 per subscriber in the quarter, or a little over 8%.

Given that Du reached 850,000 subscribers in September last year, Du's result in the last quarter of 2007, a revenue of some Dhs639mn, was achieved with half the number of subscribers. In other words, Du has achieved revenue growth of 18% on subscriber growth of 50%.

Interestingly, and to be fair to poor old Du, their ARPU (Average Revenue Per User, a telecom industry performance benchmark, although not the most accurate but certainly the first figure everyone looks at) would appear to be reasonable - dividing revenue by users, we're looking at an ARPU of something like $49, which ain't too bad - particularly not for a predominantly pre-paid user base.

But I still only know one person who uses a Du mobile...

Meanwhile, Gulf News has been spanking Etisalat over its customer service... and Dubai Sunshine has been spanking Du over theirs!!!

Cable

It struck me this morning how much this FLAG/SEA ME WE cable outage must be hurting our good friends over at Du Towers given that their network is based on Internet Protocol telephony.

Poor old Du. It must be galling for them not to be able to take over the whole market by slashing prices left right and centre and so not realise one of the main upside benefits of an IP network, while at the same time suffering from the down-side of having an IP network - being horribly exposed to service outages when people drop anchors on your international cable infrastructure.

One of the reasons why the whole country didn't flock to Du when it launched was that the regulator blocked any price competition - mad, when you have an IP based operator launching against a ruggedly circuit-switched incumbent. However, in a perverse sort of way, Du is being paid off for being a not terribly interesting competitor, because it's able to charge circuit-switched telephone rates for an IP network - an absolutely enormous profit margin.

That this state of affairs exists because the regulator is so interested in protecting the vested interests represented by former monopoly and still massively dominant telco Etisalat is undoubted. That it is also artificially halting progress in the market is also undoubted.

However, the fact remains that the Du network is utterly reliant on the Internet to carry its international traffic - and that the recent outages have enabled a quietly gleeful Etisalat to announce that it is helping Du out. Du's response is evident in today's newspapers, a faintly ridiculous slice of blablabla press release announcing that there were now 1.5 million Du customers, which Gulf News for some reason carried faithfully in all its Technicolour puke-inducing glory.

So I called my pal who has a Du mobile and asked how his service had been, rather hoping (I must confess) for a horror story to pop on the blog. But he told me that he'd had no problems at all, that service had been completely unaffected by the recent Internet outages.

As he chatted to me, he started to break up until he was completely inaudible in a sea of pops, clicks and gaps. So I'm not really sure if the Du network has been affected by the cable outages or that's just the service quality he's used to. And I don't know anyone else who uses Du to ask - even though there are, apparently, 1.5 million of them out there...

Du du du Dah dah dah

I'm a little hesitant to post about Dubai's most splendid and admirable new telecom operator Du again, because last time I took a pop at them the blog was flooded by readers from Du network addresses and picked up some really daft comments from people using Du's corporate network. You can tell they worked for Du because they had Du IPs and they also referred to Du as du which is something only a du employee would Du.

So they care too much, in short.

But I can't resist. We have a new special offer from the telecom operator that likes to say 'Whaaaaaaat?' in the form of a mobile package that offers you a new Du line for a mere 1 Dirham. Yes! Pay only Dhs 55 and get 54 Dhs back in airtime! That means just Dhs 1 for your super Du line!

Except that Dubai's new mobile operator's previous promotion offered subscribers a line for just 1 Dirham! All they had to do was buy a line for Dhs 155 and they got Dhs 154 back in airtime! That meant just Dhs 1 for your line!

The difference, smarter readers will note, is that they've dropped the package price by Dhs 100 ($27 or so, depending on whether we keep the peg of Dhs 3.657 to the Yankee Dollar, which seems likely).

I'm not sure I get it. They're trumpeting a million happy users, but they're dropping their pants on price and the barrier to adoption alike with a promotion that is pricing a new Du line at $15 and presenting it as a 98% cashback deal. Next it'll be a line for Dhs 2 - with Dhs 1 in airtime...

And I still have not had ONE person who has failed the 'Du Test'. So I'm still a little cynical about those million users, too.

If you can't sell a mobile line for Dhs 1 (30-odd cents), what CAN you sell it at? If the barrier to entry, at Dhs 155, is too high in a country with one of the world's highest GDPs per capita, what ARE they getting wrong?

Is dropping price the answer, then, for Du? Or is it time for the company to perhaps consider some smart, differentiated marketing together with a range of targeted service propositions that intelligently segmented audiences in the UAE will buy?

No, I thought not. It's back to mindless jingles and pointless promos then. Watch out for the 'Win a Bar of Gold With Du' promotion. It's only a matter of time...

The Du Test

So Du announced it has reached 850,000 subscribers this week. I do find that interesting in view of the continuing consistency of the results I am receiving from applying The Du Test.

The Du Test is designed to gain a holistic view of the comparative penetration of mobile operators in a given market as a ratio of deployed client side devices in customers’ terminal prehensile upper organs. See?

It consists of giving your mobile number to people without the prefix that the TRA has insisted on introducing to differentiate the two operators. Etisalat’s is 050, Du’s is 055. So you talk to a hotel reservation service, or the electronics shop to arrange a delivery, or the bank to complain (invariably) or the taxi company. And you give your number as the last seven digits only.

Now, if something like a fifth of all people in the UAE (pre-amnesty) are using a Du mobile, you’d expect at least one of those conversations to contain the words: “Is that 050 or 055, sir?”

And not one, not.one, has done so yet.

Nobody I know uses a Du mobile. Some people registered and bought the sim because they could. Others bought in and rejected the service. But nobody I know, personally or professionally, uses it.

Where are they, then? Hands up, you 850,000 brave subscribers! Be heard! Wear it on your shirts with pride! Let us know that you DO du! Run round the malls singing Dudududududududuuu at the top of your voices!

Hmmm. Funny. Silence so far...

Wot, No Posts?

No posts over the weekend. Phone company Etisalat cut off our Internet for non payment. It's a long story. Needless to say the entire episode involved the words unhelpful, process driven, automated and pillock.

Back online now.

One day someone's going to work out that great customer service is only possible when you empower your staff to take decisions so that they can go the extra mile to meet customers' needs. And when they do, my money says the last monkey to get to the typewriter will be Etisalat.

Although, strange to recount, I'm still not minded to go to du.

Etisalat Customers Happy. Du Faces Task. Maktoob Effs Up.

Maktoob Research, the research arm of Arabic portal Maktoob.com, has published a report citing that 74% of Etisalat customers are happy campers.

They didn’t use the phrase ‘happy campers’, obviously!

The 74%, drawn from a sample of 360 customers (A nice round number! Arf! Arf!), are either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the mobile operator’s services. Gulf News took the opportunity in its story earlier today to point out that Du faces an ‘uphill task’ in converting these happy souls to its cause.

Uphill task. Right.

It's a great story. Media in the Middle East loves research: figures go down really well. But what amazes me is that Maktoob itself didn't make any reference to the story on its homepage on the day its release was due to get coverage - today. So any curious souls (like me) that went there to find out more didn't have a reference point to the story. Worse, when you finally find the Maktoob Research section of the site (still no reference to the cellular report) and look up its press section, the release isn't posted there!

In all fairness, I saved the original post this morning and gave 'em all day to catch up. It's 9pm DXB time and nothing's changed. The media's talking about Maktoob's cellular research, but Maktoob's not. Own goal.

Integrated campaign. So easy to say, so hard to do...

Does Du do it for you?

What, indeed, to Du?

Go to www.du.com. It's a reasonably cool and very fast (the world's fastest, apparently) WHOIS lookup site (A WHOIS lets you find out who owns which Internet website, so you type in the name of the site and the WHOIS returns who the owner and operator of the site are).

Or try searching for du in Yahoo! and you'll get, among other strange things, Ducks Unlimited, the North American waterfowl conservation site. This is a neat link as if you look up du in Wikipedia, you'll find that one of the many things it stands for is the name in New Caledonia for Sylviornis neocaledoniae - an extinct galliform bird.

Wikipedia also tells us that DU, du or Du also stands for:

• Data unit
• Delhi University
• Delta Upsilon
• Democratic Underground
• Depleted uranium
• Desktop underwriter
• Dhaka University
• Dial-up access
• Disney University
• Dobson unit
• Doctor of the University
• Doshisha University
• Drexel University
• Ducks Unlimited
• Duisburg (city code plate prefix)
• Duke University
• Duquesne University
• Durham University
• Hemus Air (IATA airline designator)
• University of Denver
• December Underground ( AFI's 7th studio album)

Which, honestly, all says more about the telephone company than I wanted to say in the first place. I'm still with etisalat, despite having had every intention of switching.

As the late, great Ian Dury tells us: what a waste.