Mobily successfully completed its mobile broadband coverage expansion, the company said in a statement Friday. Mobily's state-of-the-art High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network now covers 90 percent of all populated areas in the Kingdom, representing 414 cities, regions and areas, it said. The expansion of coverage in these areas comes as part of Mobily's overall strategy to maintain its leadership in the field of data communications and delight its customers all built on the basis having the best work environment in the Kingdom. Among the new areas covered are Afeef, Al-Ahmar, Al-Badea Al-Shamaly, Al-Badea Al-Janoubi, Al-Kharfah, Al-Rodha, Al-Seeh, Artawi, Al-Raqas, Sahib, Arwi, Aseela, Niam, Al-Rafea, Bada Bin Arfaj, Marwan, Masadah, Tamrah, Khiran, Al-Dhabaiah, Al-Nasifah, Maqboolah, Najan, Hijrat Boudha, Hazaw, Al-Khafs and Al-Reen. The announcement comes days after Mobily revealed that it had concluded successful trials of its first evolved High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+) network speed upgrade of 42 megabits/second in response to sustained demand for mobile broadband in previously covered areas and new customers in recently covered areas. The new speed is expected to be rolled out in major cities in the interim and will be the first major speed upgrade since Mobily became the first operator in the region to launch HSPA+ towards the end of 2009 at speeds of 21 Mbps. Mobily closed 2009 with one million customers subscribed to its high-usage bundles, and an overall base of 18.2 million. According to the Communications and Information Regulatory Commission's annual report, wireless broadband grew 488 percent to 1.41 million wireless broadband subscriptions and representing 51 percent of all broadband connections in the country, as compared to a 47 percent share for ADSL. Of those 1.41 million wireless broadband subscriptions, one million were on Mobily's network, giving the company a market share of 70 percent market of all wireless subscriptions and 36 percent of all broadband connections in the Kingdom. Mobile data traffic on Mobily's network has grown exponentially over the past three years prompting the GSM Association to describe Mobily's network as the busiest on the face of the planet. In December of 2009 alone, Mobily's HSPA network exchanged 1.23 petabytes of traffic up 283 percent across a period of 12-months from 0.51 petabytes in December of 2008.
