Competition is the drive for development, where it leads to higher quality of services, lower prices and the adoption of latest technologies. It is a race that pumps innovation and progress into the veins of the sector.
The TRA role is to create an optimal enabling environment in which the UAE Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector will emerge as a leader in the global market place. It works to support and enable the ICT sector in the UAE by safeguarding competition, providing fair access to the domestic infrastructure, and ensuring the optimal use of natural resources through the implementation of best practice in every area.
With competition, regulation becomes a must. All market oriented companies and corporations pursue profit, where money cartels may be formed to drive competitors away and lead to monopoly; or may reach an understanding for one party to focus on one service while the other focuses on another, and hence, harm competition in the core. The regulator focuses on protecting competition rather than the competitor, where it issues regulations and policies that organize the process of competition and the market dynamics to ensure the survival of competition facing money cartels and illegal cooperation. Without a regulated sector, the purpose of competition will seize to exist.
The TRA is an independent public authority established under Federal Law by Decree No. 3 of 2003, to oversee the telecommunications sector and all Licensees of the UAE.
ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology. ICT covers all services and tools related to telecommunications, communications, Information Technology, Internet, cyberspace, radio and TV, spectrum, computers, etc. By the last quarter of the 20th Century, ICT started to take more space in the day-to-day life and national norms within humankind societies; now, however, ICT has become the basic nerve of the dynamics of human societies.