Future
When King Abdullah II ascended to the throne in 1999, he stated his intentions to turn Jordan into the high-tech capital of the Middle East and to create a Silicon Valley-like venture in Jordan. King Abdullah equipped all Jordanian schools with computers and internet connection and instituted an ICT curriculum into Jordan's education system. ICT faculties were established in Jordanian universities and these campuses have been churning out 15,000 ICT graduates every year. Information access centers were established across the Kingdom to allow rural areas access to the Internet.
Jordan will most likely surpass ICT giants like India and Israel if these reforms continue. The Jordanian Government has overwhelming supported these initiative and heavily invested in Jordan's ICT sector. The result is the most competitive ICT industry in the region. Jordan has one of the highest internet penetration rates in the region. All of these accomplishments have happened in the past few years.
By 2011, Jordan will have a 50% internet penetration rate, 35,000 employed in the ICT sector, and over $3 billion revenues.
The number of phone lines has decreased dramatically in the past three years to below 500K telephone lines, due to the introduction of WI-Max technology and 3G networks.
Read more about this topic: Telecommunications In Jordan
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The planet’s survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)