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:

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.

I was out on a meeting yestderday with Dan Stuart, the head of strategy for Bayt.com, the jobs website. We were talking about Intilaq, a new initiative by the company. Intilaq is a very interesting combination of venture capital fund, angel investor and business incubator (expect a story in tomorrow's newspaper).

But what really struck me was how big these guys are, in terms of physical presence and staff numbers. I knew they were big, but I never thought they were this big.

A group of Islamic scholars have told Qatari investors that subscribing to the IPO of Vodafone Qatar, which will soon break the Middle East's last telecommunications monopoly, does not contravene Shariah law. According to Gulf Times:

Subscribing to the shares offered by the Vodafone telecom company will not contradict the Shariah, according to a fatwa jointly issued by Qatar's prominent Islamic scholar Dr Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and six other reputable scholars.

Bill Gates, The Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived, has spent the last few days in the UAE. He was treated to, among other things, some quality time with Sheikh Hamdan, the deputy prime minister, an afternoon at Abu Dhabi's Red Bull Air Race (where he was fitted out with a uniform of Team Abu Dhabi, the newest entrant to the contest), and a meeting with Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai.

Of course, the local twitterati were ahead of the game on this one, with a number of Gates spottings and general "he's in town" talk coming out well in advance of any reports by us slack-footed media types.

You're trying to promote a fairly obscure industry conference. You need your press release to stand out from the gaggle of events getting ready to hit the UAE. You need a press release that will get attention, but have nothing headline-worthy to declare. What do you do?

The organisers of the Next Generation Telecom Summit, happening next month in Fujairah, have the answer. Mention the iPhone. In fact don't just mention it - scoop every newspaper, gadget blog, tech website and iPhone lover in the region by announcing that not only have du secured a deal to launch the iPhone, but that their CEO will announce the deal officially at your conference.