Saudi mobile operator Etihad Etisalat (Mobily), Saudi Arabia's fastest-growing telecommunications operator, is the first to use Evolved High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA+) in the region on its 3.75G network, available in 337 areas in the Kingdom, the company announced on Saturday. HSPA+ facilitates internet access at speeds of up to 21.6 megabits per second. Mobily, the Kingdom's leader in mobile broadband, is keen to bring the latest in telecommunications and broadband technologies in the world to the fingertips of its consumers. Mobily would sell a modem that supports HSPA+ soon. Last year, Mobily spread HSPA+ in Jeddah, Makkah, Madina, Dammam and Dhahran. It will spread the technology in Riyadh over the next two weeks. Mobily made mobile broadband available to its subscribers in 80 percent of the Kingdom's populated areas. They can connect to the internet using a simple-to-use, compact USB modem or directly through their mobile phones. Mobily had passed the one million mobile broadband subscribers landmark. Those subscribers belong to both high-usage mobile bundles and broadband internet bundles. Mobily had launched its bundles on May 19, 2007. By that year's end, Mobily had 73,000 mobile broadband subscribers. In 2008, Mobily announced it had 266,000 broadband subscribers, representing a growth of 264 percent. The GSM Association, the world's GSM promoter, declared that Mobily's network is the busiest in the world with data traffic. Since December 2007, data traffic grew tenfold, reaching 50 terabytes in December 2009. Connect modem promo Mobily launched a new promotion on its Connect bundles on Saturday, in which the company bundles an HSPA, 3.75G Connect modem with 5 gigabytes of data free for the first month, for SR249. Mobily said that the offer is available to all of its prepaid and postpaid customers at all of its outlets for one month from Saturday. David Murphy, Mobily's chief marketing officer, said the new promotion manifests his company's keenness to provide the best value for its customers, and to make the joy of using fast internet anywhere accessible to everyone in the Kingdom. He added that Mobily's Connect bundles are designed to fulfill the needs of all customer segments. “What makes Mobily's Connect product so special is that customers are guaranteed to experience high-speed connectivity through our 3.75G network, which is available in 80 percent of the Kingdom's populated areas,” said Murphy.
