Mobile coverage
While since 2011 the country’s whole territory is covered by 3G (in the South also 4G operated by Adennet), the number of people having actual access to the service is just slightly decreasing.
Yemen is a dangerous market for company personnel as well as destructive for infrastructure, such as mobile towers, which are often deliberately targeted. Due to the lack of stability neither personnel of the internet supplier, not the gadgets and mobile towers are secure. In this situation, solely supplying basic telecommunications services to the community becomes extremely challenging. It is difficult to perform maintenance to infrastructure in areas of open conflict. Despite the hardships, aid organizations are not giving up on Yemen. In 2015 the Emergency Telecommunication Cluster (ETC) was activated to provide telecommunication services to the humanitarian community working on the field. By doing so, ETC contributes to almost 3000 person’s everyday work to solve the humanitarian crisis. Operating on 11 sites, ETC aims to enable the information sharing, provide coordination of partners and activites, and maintain the ETC helpdesk to support the response community. They are operating through satellites and power charging stations.
Satellite and radio communications have become crucial technologies to supply services in Yemen as in the rural and remote areas there is a scarcity of telecommunications equipment, infrastructure and service providers such as ISPs. Given the current political, economic and security situation, an improvement in services and infrastructures appears unlikely in the short to medium term.