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How Mobile Operators Are Caught In the Middle In the Middle East and Africa
First time accepted submitter singinho writes "In times of political turmoil, operators are caught in the middle, between the wishes of the regime and the communications needs of the public. Orange exec Marc Rennard explains how he is forced to risk the lives of his employees." Companies operating with the blessing of any particular regime end up in some interesting predicaments; trying to keep communications open in a place like Mali (one of the places Rennard oversees) must make for some exciting work days for the guys in the field.
Whose laws?
When a country has multiple groups claiming to be the government which set do you follow?
What about when the government is obviously not legitimate?
Watch out or you'll be Caught in the Middle in the Middle.
A similar crisis to when your appetite's pokin' atcha, pokin' atcha.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Filipinos, Germans, French, Polish, Japanese, Koreans
Yes, because those countries are covered in oil. So much, huge mistake giving them their national sovereignty back after liberation.
sudo make me a sandwich
I'm getting really tired of people putting down snakes. They're really very impressive animals.
Whose laws? When a country has multiple groups claiming to be the government which set do you follow?
What about when the government is obviously not legitimate?
Orange basically goes where nobody else wants to go or where no sane company would ever operate to get money. They haven't really been able to compete very well with bigger, established players in more developed countries (with some exceptions) so they look for what you might call "garbage revenue streams" by going where there's little to no competition. Given that, they're likely to listen to anybody in charge and not ask questions if they think that doing so will preserve their revenue streams. This leads to a bit of a balancing act where they can't completely turn their backs on the people in charge and get kicked out of the country, but they also can't be completely irresponsible to their customer base either for fear of losing customers. But if they think that turning off the network today will enable them to get paid tomorrow, they'll do it.
I believe his employees should be free to make that choice. If he is not paying them enough to deal with the hazards I would think they would quit.
Now if he is misleading them in anyway, that is another issue.
I'd imagine that these guys are the ones that would see the most value in the sorts of long-duration persistent experiments in putting repeaters, etc. into aerostats, drones, even low-altitude satellites, etc - it would seem that getting the hardware into the stratosphere would provide three huge advantages:
1) on a tactical level it gets your hardware up out of the reach of people, generally. I have to imagine that vandalism, theft, and malicious mischief makes the maintenance of (even something as capital-cheap as) a cell network a bloody challenge (sometimes literally)
2) on a more strategic level, having these things up out of (easy) reach of a government can likewise somewhat allow the carrier to maintain a neutrality as far as traffic that they might otherwise find difficult. Governments have many, many ways that they can put pressure on carriers organizationally and financially, sure, but at least this would remove one lever. (OK, it wouldn't be removed; a government could likely take down a persistent UAV given enough motivation - but launching a ground to air missile is a little more obvious and blatant.)
3) finally, to have the hardware easily-removable from the geographic area.
-Styopa
... its almost the same as the USA
Sigh.
I was waiting for the 'it's like the USA!' post.
Here's the thing: It's NOT
In the USA example, no one at the telecom is being tortured and/or killed. No one in the government of the USA has a 'magic button' to turn off the internet & cell coverage.
I work in the 5th poorest country in the world (Guinea-Bissau, West Africa) where Orange is the only internet provider and one of the three telecom providers. Last report I saw, we, the 5th poorest country, have THE most expensive (for what you get) telecom/internet service in the world.
I spent a lot of time researching autocratic leaders (call them Dictators, or just "Dicks" if you like) when writing the Dictator's Handbook (http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/) and the research shows that despite promises to the contrary about the benefits of privatization, clever dictators can still have their way with privately-run services like cellphone companies. It's normal - almost expected - in much of the world for calls to be monitored, intercepted, dropped, and blocked. Everyone knows the SMS outage stories (Belarus, Russia, Egypt, to name just a few) but it goes way beyond that. Most of the commercial gadget conveniences that have made life easier have benefitted autocrats as well, who have new ways to track, monitor, and basically hassle its people. Chapters 4 and 11 of the Handbook cover it in depth. Now we get to smart phones, facebook accounts, linkedin profiles, and all the happy social media stuff: it's all a treasure trove for autocrats. The research dug up anecdotes about Iranians dragged in for questioning and presented with copies of their own email, cellphone call record, and worse.
If you want to weaken dictators, I don't think Twitter is the way to go. Shortwave radio was just as effective, if not more, and it was a hell of a lot harder to block. Cellphone operators are absolutely in a tough spot: required to meet quality-of-service rules while simultaneously kissing the Dictator's Ass. It's not an enviable place to be in, I can assure you.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
And what country are you from? Name one country that has not engaged in "toppling peaceful regimes, undermining democracies, assassinating legitimate heads of state, waging illegitimate war and generally just fucking things up and killing thousands just for the sake of funnelling money into the right pockets" for thousands of years. If you want to hold us (America) responsible for every action our country has been engaged in, I would wager that our 250 year history is nothing compared to the rampant bloodshed, Feudalism, and barbaric nature of 95% of the planet.
sudo make me a sandwich