Sudnick: Communications is as basic to human life as is breathing fresh air. Cellphones brought deep lungfuls of life, and quickly.

When I arrived in Iraq, if two individuals wished to meet, they had to assign runners or couriers to convey the message. Only the privileged few had access to the few landline telephones. And remember that in prelude to the Coalition forces' invasion, Baghdad was subjected to a wake-up phase, which was called "Shock and Awe." Guess what those bombing targets were? You got it: telecommunications exchanges.

PHOTO: Daniel Sudnick Collection

Al-Mamoon Telephone Exchange

When I arrived in country, less than half of Iraq's estimated 1.1 million landline subscriber lines were operational. The country's rudimentary single mode fiber-optic transmission network, moreover, was subject to daily outages due to sabotage. Making telephone calls anywhere was chancy. And there were no international gateways. Government office facilities, including those of the Ministry of Communications, had been looted. When the network and its components were at all functional, quality of service levels, moreover, were anyone's guess. Indeed, the technical expression "QOS" was an unknown concept.

Iraqis, no differently than any other human beings on this planet, thrive on communicating with each other. And young Iraqis differ little from their counterparts in other societies. The preferred mode of communication now is the cellphone. Cellphones are called "mobile" phones there.

Such was the pent-up demand for mobile phones that Iraqis of all economic strata would sacrifice in other areas so as to acquire this basic commodity, once it became available. Many of the female translators working at the CPA Headquarters in the Republican palace would wear their newly acquired status symbols on lanyards around their necks, much like jewelry pieces. And with prepaid cards, the Iraqis would seemingly talk endlessly—men and women alike—until they ran out of minutes. How different is that from anywhere else?

Spectrum: In the same period, Internet use in Iraq has increased, quoting Zorpette, "from an estimated 4500 tightly monitored and restricted subscribers before the war to some 150 000 unmonitored and unrestricted subscribers." In your experience, how has this changed perceptions of the role that technology can potentially play in educating and informing Iraqi citizens?

Sudnick: One of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) of which I assumed responsibility was the State Company for Internet Services, SCIS. After conducting some research, I discovered that this private network was largely a toy for use by selected government officials. Most of the IP routers were co-located in central offices, where they could access the Iraqi Telephone and Posts Company's (ITPC) transmission network. At the exchange level, users would access the IP network via remote dial-up from either private residences, government facilities, or occasionally from Internet cafes. Yes, the total number was somewhere around four thousand subscriber accounts. Uplinks to the rest of the world existed via VSAT terminals.

After the war, private Internet operators began to multiply. VSAT antennae sprouted like wildflowers after a spring rain. Although we at CPA were adhering to ITU technical standards and applying commonly accepted industry management practices, including issuing licenses for use of the spectrum (this is how we managed the cell phone process), we found the numbers of ISPs too many to track. So we largely turned a blind eye to entrepreneurial ISPs and their VSAT dishes.

The net result of this "benign neglect" policy is that Internet access in Iraq has begun to catch up for sorely lost time. With unfettered access to the Internet, at least Iraqis will have access to unfiltered raw data. They can then make their own choices with their newfound knowledge.

Not all Iraqi officials agree with this "hands off" policy, however. Some that I dealt with wanted to impose content filters and to block certain addresses.

Spectrum: Could you please tell us about how the CPA process worked in administering local and international contractors in restoring public communications in Iraq?

Sudnick: With fits and starts. The CPA was an incarnation of the Pentagon. The U.S. State Department and its surrogate U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which received stewardship of the sole source reconstruction contracts appropriated immediately after the decision to go to war, did not see eye-to-eye on many issues, including policy and use of contractor resources. I witnessed this conflict in ministries other than mine.

By contrast, our MOC team worked smoothly with USAID and its prime contractor, Bechtel National, to which USAID had awarded the contract to repair the battle-damaged central office exchanges in and around Baghdad and al Basra. I would have written Bechtel's technical specifications differently, however, so as to leverage technology advances of the past 15 years. Nevertheless, the exchanges were restored to operational status by mid-February 2004 with Lucent 5ESS class 5 and 4 switches. Our extended contractor teams began to upgrade sections of the fiber network to OC-3 and stood up an earth station as an international gateway.

Indeed, at times, we were toying with junking the legacy circuit-switched network and building as its replacement an all-IP network, running over an OC-48 backbone. Alas, the politicians prevailed. What was spec'ed and built was "like for like." Consequently, this decision precluded our architecting and building data networks and modern Operations Support Systems for managing multiple, interconnecting networks and software-defined virtual private networks. Humans can absorb change only so much. And leaping to "all IP" was too much for even many in Washington to accept.

Nevertheless, my team and I tried to fix this shortfall via the supplemental budget appropriation for Iraq Reconstruction. To my knowledge, Lucent, Motorola, Nortel, NEC, and other telecom contractors have been capturing pieces of our vision and roadmap. Let's hope for the best with these big networking jobs.

On the small business side of the equation, the CPA set up a bulletin board at the Baghdad Convention Center. Here, CPA would advertise small jobs. I witnessed steady traffic into the Convention Center. The CPA Head of Contracting Activity, who also oversaw the cellphone licensing process, would tell me that the number of small business contracts issued by his staff was steady, regular, and fairly routine.