Bahrain and telecom in the late 1970s
In 1978 Bahrain was the first country to operate a commercial cellular system. (internal link) It was probably a simple, two cell affair. Why Bahrain and not, say, Saudi Arabia? In the 1970s the former British colony of Bahrain was the center of telecommunications in the Middle East. Cable and Wireless operated the latest local and toll switching equipment, a satellite ground station, and a training academy for Middle Eastern workers. In Girdle Round The Earth: The Story of Cable and Wireless, Hugh Barty-King says:
"Through any of the nine automatic exchanges of the Bahrain Telephones internal network run by Cable and Wireless, under the direction of Alec Sherman, anyone could dial in from outside Bahrain and be connected via the satellite station direct to London. Those who wrote only Arabic could confidently telegraph their business associates abroad in the knowledge that the Message Switching Computer in Bahrain would switch telegrams written in Arabic script."
Barty-King also writes:
"[C&W's] wide ranging telecommunication system has made Bahrain a commercial and financial centre second to none in an area where oil revenues had brought other states very much greater wealth. The telecommunications build-up which began in 1947 as seen, and had been accelerated in 1968 which was going to expire in July 1982, had given the island a new role. The pearl fishing industry on which the economy once depended was no more; the first oil well to be found in the Gulf was all but spent; cheap natural gas had given birth to cheap aluminium smelting; Saudi Arabian oil was refined and ships of all nations repaired. But none of these activities justified the frenzied hotel and office building on the reclaimed land at Manamah. It was the availability of instant, cheap telephone, Telex, high speed data, facsimile and television communication which had attracted the money-brokers, the off-shore banking units, the off-shore traders, the international airline operators and news agencies like Reuters with their Monitor Project, the shipping companies and stockbrokers were giving Bahrain its new prosperity."
"The Kingdom of Bahrain is an archipelago of low lying islands located in the Arabian Gulf of the eastern shore of Saudi Arabia." This graphic was from: http://www.miceonline.net/bahrain/intro.htm.