Mobily blames Saudi Oger for Riyadh telephone breakdown

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A photograph on the Mobily website shows one of the cables its says were cut by construction workers from Saudi Oger.

Mobily has blamed construction company Saudi Oger for the seven hour outage of its services which occurred on Wednesday afternoon.

All Mobily telephone and internet services were unavailable in the Central and Eastern regions of the Kingdom, after two major fibre optic cables were apparently accidentally cut by construction workers.

According to Mobily, two cables, one on King Abdullah road in Riyadh, and another in Khurais, 180 km east of Riyadh were cut by Saudi Oger, which is carrying out road construction works around the capital.

In a statement issued by the company, as reported in Arab News, Humoud Al-Ghobaini, corporate communication manager of Mobily said: "Both cables were core to keeping Mobily's network on air and its customers in touch.

"The outage of Mobily services caused considerable trouble for our eleven million customers across the Kingdom. Regardless of the advance intimation, and the fact that the cables were buried under seven metres of concrete, Saudi Oger cut through the major cables," he added.

Mobily say that service was restored by around 9.30pm on Wednesday, although some customers said they still had no service as late as 11.30pm.

Mobily is now understood to be calculating losses from the outage, which it says could run into hundreds of thousands of Riyals, and is considering how best to compensate customers.

Saudi Oger has denied the claims, and said it will counter-sue Mobily if the operator brings action against it.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Photo
Posted by Sebastien on Monday 21 July 2008 at 00:51 UAE time

This photo is certainly not for the cable being cut!

Service
Posted by Sebastien, KSA on Sunday 20 July 2008 at 18:16 UAE time

What I don't understand is how would the company cut the cables in Riyadh and in Khureis (180Km from Riyadh) at the same time?! Knowing that the company is working in Riyadh only.
On the other hand, it seems that Mobily fiber optic infrastructure is not properly designed especially that for such applications the network must have a star/ring topology so that if any route fails another route takes over!

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