The president of the Saudi Telecom Company has refused to comment on what I, along with many others, wrote in our local newspapers resulting from his statement about competition between communication providers. The statement was made after a company from the UAE won the contract to become the second telecommunications company to provide GSM services in the Kingdom. The new company will compete with STC which for long has had a local monopoly, made enormous profits and steadily abused and failed to consider the consumer.
The writer of one article begged the STC president to respond to his comments; other writers did the same but he chose to ignore them all. Ignoring the public is of course how many government departments react when facing criticism.
Never mind about the president’s silence, I am now going to tell you how STC is eating us all alive. In the summer, I went abroad twice and each time I compared what I paid for phone service in those countries with what we pay here. To say that I was both disappointed and angry would not be an understatement. In the Czech Republic, I bought a cell phone chip with a prepaid card for the equivalent of SR72. (Just for information, there are three phone companies in the country.) For that amount of money, I called home six times in addition to the countless local calls I made.
Every time I used the card, I felt sad for us and how we are taken advantage of. During 32 days, I recharged my phone three times for the equivalent of SR217. During that same time, I was asked twice by STC to increase my phone limit because the few calls I made on STC using my roaming facility amounted to SR3,000. My cell phone constantly made me sad when I received STC messages warning me that I was about to reach the limit.
My second trip was to the UAE. I had learned my lesson and so decided not to use my Saudi phone. I bought a chip from the local UAE company for which I paid SR165 and later recharged it for about SR30. I thought the chip would soon reach its limit as they do here in Saudi Arabia but it did not. After a great number of local calls, I still had about SR31 remaining. At that time, I needed to make a call to my son in Riyadh and thought that SR31 would not be enough to make an international call. When I spoke to my son, I told him that I expected the line to go dead as I had only a small amount remaining on my card. To my surprise, however, the line did not go dead and when I checked to see how much remained on the card, I learned that SR29 did. In other words, I had made an international call for only SR2. Could that happen here with any of our phone cards?
The sad and unfortunate fact is that such a thing will never happen here. Even though the same UAE company will be providing the service, it will not be able to compete because STC will not allow it to. In other words, the call from Riyadh to the UAE will cost three times as much as the same call from the UAE to Riyadh. And both calls with the same company! Don’t you find that strange, Mr. STC President? Probably phoning from Dubai to Riyadh is cheaper than sending the same article by fax — not just inside the Kingdom but inside Riyadh itself.
