48m mobile subscriptions in KSA

[gallery size="medium" td_select_gallery_slide="slide" td_gallery_title_input="48m mobile subscriptions in KSA" ids="81550,81551,81547,81548,81549,81552"] By Fatima Muhammad The total number of mobile subscriptions has reached 48 million by the end of Q2 2016, with penetration rate of 152%. Prepaid subscriptions constitute the majority (over 84%) of all mobile subscriptions, according to recent statistics by Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC). Fixed telephone lines reached 3.6 million by the end of Q2 2016, of which around 1.9 million or 52% were residential lines. This represents a household teledensity around 31.1 %, while the population teledensity is about 11%. It is noted that the number of subscriptions has continued to decrease due to competition of the mobile services, in prices and variety of offerings, which make it a substitution of fixed services for some of the users. The total number of mobile broadband subscriptions reached around 26.6 million by the end Q2 2016, for all subscriptions representing a population penetration rate of 83.5%. Fixed broadband subscriptions including DSL, fixed wireless (WiMax), FTTx and other fixed lines decreased to reach around 3.06 million subscriptions at the end of Q2 2016. The fixed broadband penetration rate stands at about 41% of households. The number of Internet users has increased rapidly in the last years whereas it increased from 41% in 2010 to reach 70.4% by the end of Q2 2016, the number of Internet users is about 22.4 million, it's noted that the increase in the demand for Internet services and broadband was observed due to high use of social networking applications, video on demand (YouTube, Snapchat) and gaming. Subscribers are seeking higher speeds and larger packages resulting in heavy data traffic in the past few years.