JEDDAH, 27 August — Saudi Telecom Company is expected to slash international telephone charges of calls made through cabins by up to 18 percent from Sept. 1.
The move aims at supporting Saudis who have invested in telephone call cabins.
The cabin owners have been hit hard after the launch of SAWA pre-paid mobile chips as most expatriates switched to mobile phones instead of going to cabins to call their relatives back home.
The new cuts in charges are likely to increase business of call cabins throughout the country. STC has urged cabin owners to change their computer systems before applying new discounts.
Abdullah Al-Zaid, director of ordinary telephones at the company in the Western Province, told Arab News that the company would make sure whether all cabins had changed their systems before introducing new tariffs.
There are more than 3,000 telephone cabins in the Kingdom, mainly in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Makkah and Madinah. Saudis started investing large amounts in telephone cabins since 1996.
Mohammed Jameel Mulla, governor of the newly formed Saudi Telecom Authority, has said that his organization would review charges for various telecommunication services in the Kingdom.
“The authority will work to extend the best possible services, encourage competition among companies and protect the rights of all parties,” he said.
Mulla said the telecom sector would witness major developments in the coming years and the authority would make use of other countries’ experience in order to increase revenue.
Mulla, a former undersecretary for technical affairs at the Ministry of PTT, said the authority would regulate the market to make way for healthy competition when the telecom sector is opened up. “We will work to develop the telecom sector in terms of quality and quantity,” he said.
The governor said the authority would review the service rates to make them more competitive and reasonable. However, he said the strategy of price cuts should be logical. “We will not be able to sell at SR3 the service which we bought for SR5. We will try to sell it at SR5.5 instead of SR10,” he said.
