Saudi Arabia possesses a steadily growing telecoms market, reports Research & Markets. As with many telecoms markets in the region, lack of strong competition in the fixed-line market meant much of the growth has been underpinned by mobile.
With the fixed line market subject to increased competition, incumbent operator STC has focused on international expansion and the underdeveloped broadband market, launching FttH services boasting speeds of up to 1Gb/s and offering IPTV services. By 2015 the incumbent plans to derive 50% of total revenue from international operations, compared with 33% currently.
Broadband services are available via ADSL, fibre and wireless. Infrastructure-based competition in the FttX market will only intensify after two competing operators, backed by the incumbent telcos of Bahrain and United Arab Emirates respectively, signed agreements in 2011 with vendors to deploy competing networks.
Faster speeds and increasingly affordable broadband access has fostered development of a digital economy, encompassing government services (e-government), e-health, e-education and e-commerce. The latter has received a boost following implementation of a geo-coordinate based addressing scheme in a country where not all streets are names and all houses numbered.
Intense mobile competition among four mobile network operators and availability of mobile number portability has pushed mobile SIM card penetration levels towards 200%. Prepaid users represent the overwhelming majority of total subscriptions, only adding to the fierce competition. All three GSM/WCDMA based operators have either launched LTE networks or awarded contracts to do so, underpinning a future growth path centred on mobile broadband services and applications.
