The signs have been there, but a report by telecoms consultancy Strategy Analytics seem to confirm what many already believe: the global economic downturn caused the weakest ever growth rate since the modern cellphone industry began in 1983. Ouch.

Is network sharing the way of the future for mobile operators? How can companies who are accustomed to murderous competition learn to hold hands and share their favourite toys? We take a look at the current situation.

Du's first quarter results were fairly solid, most impressively, the network added FIVE TIMES as many new customers as Etisalat did in the same period. But revenues and profit were down on the December quarter. We spoke with du's CEO, Osman Sultan, to get the lowdown.

The Financial Times has a good story up on the increasingly intense competition in the Indian mobile market. Sure, it might have added more customers in 2008 than the entire Arab world combined, but if you think you can just throw a stick in the ground over there and start printing money, you're probably doomed. Will be interesting to see how Etisalat fares in its launch there - an Egypt-style situation is probably the best-case scenario.

More international fibre-optic cables will be laid this year than in the peak of the dotcom boom in 2001, according to numbers from Telegeography, a research firm. The Middle East is responsible for a bunch of them, which is good news, because as reported earlier, there is no use having a national fibre optic network humming along at 100 megabits per second if the international bandwidth can't keep up.

I just had a very cool phone chat with Jeff Schick, IBM's VP for social software. In the fleeting world of web-based Next Big Things that are huge today and dead tomorrow - see David's post below - these guys have a bit of a longer view. Jeff said IBM employees had a public "profile" page on the company's big mainframes when he joined 20 years ago.

Companies like IBM are worth listening to because they have two big features: the massive bags of cash and research talent needed to dip their toes into pretty much every trendy technology, science, philosophy and way of life on the planet, and the giant corporate customers and massive install bases that help them filter the signal from the noise, and separate the fleeting trends from the things that are here to stay.

So I asked Jeff the only question worth asking: Is twitter, and microblogging, here to stay? His answer, after the jump, was pretty interesting:

Nielsen Online just released a rather interesting study today, suggesting that 60% of Twitter users do not use the popular microblogging service one month after they sign up. The number was even higher prior to the "Oprah bump", in which the US talk show host demonstrated Twitter to millions of viewers, pushing the website into the mainstream.

"Twitter's audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month's users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent," David Martin, Nielsen Online's vice president of primary research, said in a statement.

"For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention."

The blogosphere, sensing blood in the water, spread the news in earnest.

Comm has a good interview online with the CEO of Expresso Telecommunications, a company based in the DIFC that owns mobile networks in Nigeria, Ghana, Mauritania and Senegal.

Expresso are a subsidiary of Sudan's Sudatel, and are apparently planning on an IPO on the Dubai market sometime in the next couple of years. Letting the world know you exist is a common first strategy for going public, and with the Comm interview, they are getting there. A website may be the next revolutionary step on the Long Road, with an article on a Chinese news website currently their number one Google result.

Most of their networks seem to be second-tier, niche operations, but in a booming market like Nigeria, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway, the interview is worth a read, and good work by Comm for getting one of the region's lowest profile telcos (a secret perhaps even better kept than Abu Dhabi's Warid Telecom) to briefly emerge from hiding and say hello to the world. 

UPDATE(S) - We had a very interesting interview with the TRA director general, Mohamed al Ghanim, who shed more light onto the whole situation. Etisalat also had its say, claiming the cost of complying with the TRA's request is "unjustified."

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The Arabic daily Al Khaleej has a story today saying that Etisalat has been fined by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) for failing to move forward in allowing competition in the landline telephone market.

The fine is apparently related to Etisalat implementing the carrier pre-selection system, which lets people use du through the Etisalat network. It is pretty much the central plank of the liberalisation of the UAE telecom market, which makes this a pretty interesting story, if true.

Shufflegazine, the UAE's newest tech publication, got a write up in The National this weekend. The "Apple lifestyle" magazine is the love child of Dubai's most prominent Apple fanatic, Magnus Nystedt, who also runs the Apple discussion board, Emirates Mac, and is pretty much synonymous with the Apple community here in the UAE.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that spraying ink on dead trees and shipping the end result to news stands and corner stores is not a long term money maker, but Shufflegazine is quite different.

Uh oh, Nokia. After seeing its net profit plummet 90% last week, credit rating agency Moody's have delivered a grim outlook of the Finnish mobile giant, downgrading its debt outlook from stable to negative.

Why? Well, it's not just because the recession has stopped people from buying new phones, it's also stopped people from buying Nokia's relatively antiquated devices. Think about it - when you think exciting, hot new phones, you think of the iPhone or the BlackBerry. When Nokia comes to mind, you'd likely get an image of a five-year old candybar model than its latest N96 smartphone. Moody's explains:

Alcatel-Lucent, one of the world's largest telecommunication equipment makers, announced today that Etisalat has the least call drops in the Middle East, according to independent research.