Mobily and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. signed on Tuesday a SR375 million agreement for second expansion of WiMAX (Wave2) high-speed broadband service to extend coverage to 20 cities in the Kingdom, including Jeddah and the Two Holy Cities of Makkah and Madina by the end of 2010. Khalid Al-Kaf, Mobily's CEO, and Woonsub Kim, Executive Vice-President and head of Telecom Systems Division, Samsung Electronics, signed the deal under which the high-speed broadband service will be expanded through Bayanat Al Oula, a subsidiary of Mobily. Mobily completed last year the acquisition of Bayanat Al-Oula, a leading Saudi data communication provider, and with it continued the expansion of the WiMAX Wave1 network in the four major cities of Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and Al-Khobar. “We understand how anxiousness consumers and businesses in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are to get fast and reasonably priced broadband service in a convenient manner,” said Al-Kaf in a press conference. “We believe that providing broadband using wireless technology can enable fast delivery of service and as such offer both HSPA-based and WiMAX-based broadband service,” he said. Branded broadband@home, Mobily's WiMAX service will be the only Wave2-based service in the region. It is already the first prepaid WiMAX service in the Middle East and North Africa region. The service is popular and has prompted Mobily to expand its coverage and use Wave2 technology and continue with Samsung, the current infrastructure partner, he said. Samsung will provide WiMAX Wave2 products including base station, access service network gateways and all the related equipment as well as services. Especially, U-RAS Flexible base station, which is the most suitable for flexible WiMAX network configuration due to its separated design of Radio unit and Digital unit. Kim said Samsung was pleased to keep on with Mobily's WiMAX Wave2 business following successful delivery of WiMAX Wave1 service. “We will invest all our efforts into making Mobily the main driver for leading technology adoption and evolution in the Middle East,” he said. Mobily, the largest 3.75G mobile service provider in the Middle East and North Africa region, with 2008 net profits of over SR2 billion, serving 14.8 million subscribers, plans to begin its first WiMAX Wave2 commercial service in 2010, and will expand nationwide in the coming years. – SGTHE DEAL IN A NUTSHELL• Bayanat Al-Oula's high-speed broadband service will expand to 20 cities from the four previously covered by the firm. • Bayanat's existing WiMax network serves 30,000 subscribers. With this expansion, it will be able to increase WiMax capacity by at least three times. • Samsung will deliver 1,400 stations to increase Bayant's overall number of WiMax stations to 1,800. __
