After delays, Palestinians get high-speed mobile
Facebook tries to ease heartache of breakups with new tool
RAMALLAH: Political science lecturer Amjad Abu el-Ez lived in London and Dubai for 17 years before returning home in 2014 to teach in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. He was stunned to learn he could barely check his email on the commute from his nearby village because Palestinian mobile carriers do not offer high-speed data.
“When I came here and I didn’t find 3G, I felt cut off and insulted,” el-Ez said. “This is something that has become a human right, like water, health and education. Why are we, the Palestinians, deprived of it?”
That could soon change. After years of delays, Israel said Thursday that it would allow the Palestinians to have their own 3G network, bringing relief to one of the last places in the world without mobile broadband services. The lack of high-speed access has been a source of frustration for young professionals, forcing many to seek creative solutions, sign up with Israeli carriers or scramble to find Wi-Fi networks.
Under interim peace accords, Israel controls wireless networks in the West Bank. The Palestinians are among 16 markets, including Cuba and Eritrea, that still use older 2G technology, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency.
The GSM Association, an industry group that represents mobile operators worldwide, says the newer technology can transmit as much as 62 times the amount of data per second. Without 3G, Palestinians cannot use Internet messaging services like Whatsapp, make Internet phone calls or watch streaming video, and even simple tasks such as sending email can be slow.
Frosty relationship
The Israeli decision came a week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with US President Barack Obama in Washington in what was seen as an attempt to reset their famously frosty relationship.
At the meeting, Obama emphasized the need for generating momentum to restart peace efforts, more than a year and a half after talks collapsed. Amid a two-month wave of violence, Netanyahu indicated that SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook is trying to ease the heartache of breaking up.
A feature announced Thursday will allow people who have split up with a spouse or partner to turn on an option that spares them the emotional pain of constantly seeing their exlover’s posts and pictures in their news feed on the world’s largest social network.
Facebook will begin testing the breakup protection on mobile devices in the US before deciding whether to offer it to all of its 1.5 billion accountholders worldwide. The option is designed for people who don’t want to risk offending a former husband, wife, girlfriend or boyfriend by taking the more extreme step of ejecting or blocking them from their Facebook he was considering several confidencebuilding measures to help ease the tensions. Giving the Palestinians access to 3G services seems to be the first move to come out of that meeting.
“We do not see the Palestinian people as animals,” said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev. “We continue to take steps to facilitate economic development and the overall well-being of the Palestinian population in the West Bank.”
Cogat, the Israeli defense body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, announced the deal on Thursday. It said Cogat’s commander, Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, and Palestinian Minister of Civil Affairs Hussein al-Sheikh signed a memorandum of understanding “after examination by the security establishment.” Israel did not extend 3G frequencies to the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Islamic militant group Hamas. The Palestinian telecommunications minister, Allam Mussa, said the agreement is a “great achievement for the Palestinian people.”“With having 3G, I expect a huge positive impact,” Mussa told The Associated Press. “On the economy, investment, telecommunications, education, health - on every aspect of life.”
Ammar Aker, executive chairman of the Palestinian Telecommunication Co., which runs the Jawwal mobile carrier, said he expected the 3G infrastructure to be ready within six to eight months. He said the move would open job opportunities and enable Palestinians to develop new mobile applications.
Until now, Palestinian developers had to create light applications for the slow network coverage. Most Palestinians, for instance, cannot use mobile GPS apps, in part because of the lack of high-speed access. The lack of high-speed data in Palestinian areas stands in stark contrast with Israel, a tech-savvy country whose carriers have used 3G for a decade. In January, Israel auctioned off 4G mobile broadband radio frequencies to six Israeli carriers. The faster data will remain unavailable for Palestinian carriers. —AP network. After changing their relationship status on Facebook, people will also be allowed to remove their names from past posts linking them to a former partner.
“This work is part of our ongoing effort to develop resources for people who may be going through difficult moments in their lives,” Facebook product manager Kelly Winters wrote in a blog post. The breakup protection serves as another reminder of how deeply ingrained Facebook has become in society. More than 1 billion people now hang out on Facebook at least once a day and those who have the network’s addictive mobile application installed on their smartphones tend to visit even more frequently.
The Menlo Park, California, company has incentive to try to keep its users as happy as possible. People who become upset with what appears in their Facebook feeds are more likely to avoid coming to the network, depriving the company of the opportunity to collect more information about their preferences and show them ads aimed at those interests.
The formula has turned Facebook into a huge success story since Mark Zuckerberg founded the service in a Harvard University dorm room more than a decade ago. Facebook’s market value now stands at $300 billion.