Mobily racks up 300,000 HSPA broadband subscribers

Saudi mobile operator Mobily revealed that 300,000 subscribers have signed up for HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) broadband over the last eighteen months since launching the service in mid-2007.

"When we looked at 3G and more important 3.5G, we knew that we could shift the goal post," said Khalid Al Kaf, CEO and managing director of Mobily. "We wanted to shift the mobile data consumption conversation in the minds of consumers away from kilobytes to gigabytes."

Mobily also attributes the subscriber swell to its partnership with Chinese firm Huawei Technologies, which has helped the mobile operator on an infrastructure level and provided end-user terminals (i.e., routers and modems).

The Saudi mobile operator’s infrastructure handles an average of 20 terabytes of data transfer every day, up more than 250% across the last 13 months. This has prompted the GSM Association to state Mobily has the “busiest mobile data network on the face of the planet”.

According to Informa forecasts, there will be 44.13 million HSPA subscriptions in the Middle East by the end of 2013, compared to just 12.77 fixed-line broadband subscriptions in the region.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Mobily's HSDPA worries
Posted by Mohammed, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Sunday 1 March 2009 at 12:05 UAE time


Mobily's done a great job in promoting the HSDPA network in the Kingdom, especially as STC has failed in pushing DSL to consumers. However, their network's speeds are degrading at a rapid speed. Either they'll have to increase their bandwidth, start throttling speeds, or stop selling HSPDA lines...

It's a hard choice for Mobily.

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