Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP - Middle East
Even if Iraq never becomes the Silicon Crescent, big money is at stake. Rebuilding the country's telecommunications networks and constructing new facilities from scratch would cost billions.
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American and international companies that want to take part say the biggest beneficiaries would be the Iraqi people, whose connections to the outside world were stunted by Saddam's dictatorship and ravaged by war.
"Iraq is now the land of opportunity," said Loay Abu-Osbeh, who oversees the Baghdad office for Abu-Ghazeleh Intellectual Property, a Jordan-based technology consulting firm.
"People who were outside Iraq ... have come back to Iraq to make money in Iraq, and I can see it happening. This is a business everybody is interested in, doing Internet, Internet cafes, connecting to big servers (elsewhere) in the world."
While Saddam's regime had a now-shuttered Web site, Uruklink, Iraqis had little Internet access other than in government centers, which offered slow connections routed through "proxy servers" that tried to filter out content the regime didn't like.
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Even before the recent war, the cost of rehabilitating Iraq's phone system was estimated at $1 billion over seven to 10 years.
That project will now include repairing bombed Baghdad phone exchanges, although Marines say 95 percent of the networks are intact - they just lack electricity. Some neighborhoods' exchanges are working again, but only for local calls.
All this could amount to a huge feast for Western telecom and technology companies that have been starving since the 2000 dot-com crash.
>>
Some technology aficionados say whatever communications work is done in Iraq should include hot new wireless technologies and equipment that routes long-distance calls inexpensively over the Internet, so Iraq can leapfrog other developing countries.
If paying for such projects proves difficult, there's a coalition of the willing: the London-based Committee for Information Technology Reconstruction of Iraq.
The nonprofit's founder, Ben Fitzgerald-O'Connor, suggests auctioning off Internet addresses with the ".iq" suffix that was assigned to Iraq but is now in limbo.
Assuming enough people - geniuses, presumably - would want "iq" in their e-mail or Web addresses, Fitzgerald-O'Connor estimates $10 million could be raised for Iraqi Internet projects.
"It would be a little thing the (technology) community could do to help," he said. "Something like `Geeks Without Borders.'"
Even if Iraq never becomes the Silicon Crescent, big money is at stake. Rebuilding the country's telecommunications networks and constructing new facilities from scratch would cost billions.
>>
American and international companies that want to take part say the biggest beneficiaries would be the Iraqi people, whose connections to the outside world were stunted by Saddam's dictatorship and ravaged by war.
"Iraq is now the land of opportunity," said Loay Abu-Osbeh, who oversees the Baghdad office for Abu-Ghazeleh Intellectual Property, a Jordan-based technology consulting firm.
"People who were outside Iraq ... have come back to Iraq to make money in Iraq, and I can see it happening. This is a business everybody is interested in, doing Internet, Internet cafes, connecting to big servers (elsewhere) in the world."
While Saddam's regime had a now-shuttered Web site, Uruklink, Iraqis had little Internet access other than in government centers, which offered slow connections routed through "proxy servers" that tried to filter out content the regime didn't like.
>>
Even before the recent war, the cost of rehabilitating Iraq's phone system was estimated at $1 billion over seven to 10 years.
That project will now include repairing bombed Baghdad phone exchanges, although Marines say 95 percent of the networks are intact - they just lack electricity. Some neighborhoods' exchanges are working again, but only for local calls.
All this could amount to a huge feast for Western telecom and technology companies that have been starving since the 2000 dot-com crash.
>>
Some technology aficionados say whatever communications work is done in Iraq should include hot new wireless technologies and equipment that routes long-distance calls inexpensively over the Internet, so Iraq can leapfrog other developing countries.
If paying for such projects proves difficult, there's a coalition of the willing: the London-based Committee for Information Technology Reconstruction of Iraq.
The nonprofit's founder, Ben Fitzgerald-O'Connor, suggests auctioning off Internet addresses with the ".iq" suffix that was assigned to Iraq but is now in limbo.
Assuming enough people - geniuses, presumably - would want "iq" in their e-mail or Web addresses, Fitzgerald-O'Connor estimates $10 million could be raised for Iraqi Internet projects.
"It would be a little thing the (technology) community could do to help," he said. "Something like `Geeks Without Borders.'"
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