TheRegion
The Middle East Roundup
Arab News
•Today
is the final day of Bahrain’s HI Design MEA exhibition, a trade show that attracts buyers with hotel projects throughout the Middle East, Africa and beyond.
•The
“Revival” art exhibition by Tom Young will continue until April 14 in Saida, Lebanon. The painter’s works are on display at the Hammam Al-Jadeed bathhouse in the city’s old souq and show defining moments in Lebanese history.
•Abu
Dhabi’s Music and Arts Foundation is hosting the 18th edition of the Abu Dhabi Festival, titled “The Future Starts Now.” The hybrid program combines virtual and in-person performances, exhibitions and events, and over the year will include 16 world premieres, 12 festival productions, eight global co-productions, and four creative commissions.
•The
“Abstraction and Calligraphy — Toward a Universal Language” exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi explores the calligraphy of Asia and North Africa as an inspiration for Western artists. Until June 12.
Saudi Arabia’s Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) announced on Thursday that it has launched a new initiative called Game Mode, designed to enable the Kingdom’s legion of keen video game players to make informed choices about which internet provider to use.
The initiative is part of the CITC’s efforts to encourage competition among telecom operators, raise the level of transparency in the market, and provide consumers with the best experience possible.
Game Mode will provide a quarterly award to the internet service provider with the best response time for online gaming, a key indicator of a network’s performance.
In addition, the commission will release quarterly reports comparing response times among service providers across some of
the most popular video games in the Kingdom.
Data from CITC’s first Game Mode quarterly report revealed that Mobily topped the list of average response time in the popular game “Fortnite” in the fourth quarter of 2020, at 21 seconds. Integrated Telecom came in next at 28 seconds, Zain at 29 seconds, while Saudi Telecom Co. (STC) registered an average of 35 seconds.
Mobily also topped averageresponse-time list for “Apex Legends” — another ‘Battle Royale’-style shooter game, with an average response time of 24 seconds, followed by Integrated Telecom, Zain, and STC.
For the hugely popular football game “FIFA,” Zain ranked first with an average response time of 29 seconds.
Zain and Mobily topped the list for battle arena game “League of Legends,” with an average response time of 86 seconds. Performance for this game was relatively low across the spectrum, with STC coming in third at 95 seconds and Integrated Telecom fourth at 97 seconds. However, for fixed internet average latency across Saudi Arabia, Integrated Telecom ranked first with a latency of nine milliseconds. Mobily and Zain were second and third with latencies of 13ms and 18ms respectively. STC’s fixed internet average latency was 19ms and Go’s was 34ms.
Zain claimed first place for mobile internet average latency with 33ms, closely followed by Mobily and STC with 34ms and 36ms respectively. Zain also led the field for mobile 5G average latency with 22ms. STC came in second with 24ms and Mobily third with 25ms.