ALKHOBAR, 26 July 2005 — When I moved to a new home last year, Saudi Telecom (STC) offered me as many fixed lines as I would like to have at my new location. They also made available DSL services and of course my mobile phone worked at the new place, too. I wasn’t surprised with the telecom resources made available to me last July, since I’d had all these services at my previous location.
Last week I moved to a new house and it was quite a shock to find that I’d taken up residence in STC’s telecom dungeon. At my new home the mobile doesn’t work inside the building. To make or receive calls through the ALJAWAL network there, I have to open the window and put the handset outside. When I attempted to transfer my three Al-Hatif lines to the new location, STC immediately gave me three new numbers compatible with my new area. The only problem is that the lines don’t exist. As for DSL, that’s over. I was advised by Saudi Data that it will be years before I am able to subscribe to DSL again. According to the Saudi Data representative, those exchanges with the potential for at least 1,000 DSL subscribers are the ones being upgraded first and my exchange isn’t one of them.
Reading my terrible account it might be thought that I had moved to a tiny village in the Kingdom — somewhere out in the desert perhaps. I wish that were the case because then maybe I could justify the abysmal services being offered to me by STC. The fact is that my new home is exactly 10.4 km from my old residence.
My house is in the Al-Aziziah District, immediately beside downtown Alkhobar. Al-Aziziah is one of the up and coming residential areas of the city. There are several buildings under construction on every street. When we bought the newly built house three months ago we were told that the building could accommodate four fixed lines. Two months back we saw STC digging in the street to lay the new lines. So it was quite a shock when the Al-Hatif technician rang the doorbell to advise me that he could only connect two lines, not the requested three.
“Why can’t you connect the other line?” I enquired. “Your DP has only two lines,” he answered. “No, that’s not true,” I replied. “We were told that the Network Interface Device (NID) could take four lines.” “That’s true but unfortunately STC has only provided you with one cable and two lines,” the technician explained, and he added that he would report the problem to Engineering. Interestingly, he also told me that the neighbor’s house, which was built by the same contractor as ours, and isn’t occupied yet, has four lines.
Needless to report, I was furious. Journalists can be called out to a story at any time and having full connectivity in a home office has always been one of my priorities. At first I told myself to calm down. “How bad could it be,” I thought. “STC is a modern company that posted a profit of SR5.914 billion ($1.57 billion) in the first half of 2005. They must have the resources to solve such problems as mine. I’ll just inform them about the situation and they’ll fix things up pronto.”
Thus, giving STC, Saudi Arabia’s 21st century telecom provider, the benefit of the doubt, I called the office of STC’s director general in the Eastern Province. Surely he would know how to deal with this telecom mess! His secretary advised me that the DG was on vacation for the entire summer. I was referred to another executive who took my details and told me someone would get back to me.
The STC service representative who called back wanted to help, but after a lengthy conversation he told me that there was nothing he could do except pass on my comments to other departments. The bottom line is that it would take up to five months to get Engineering to bring the missing landlines to the house. The bad mobile reception problem could only be solved by ALJAWAL putting up another wafer in the area and as for the missing DSL — getting that would require a miracle. I would have to take up my case with Al-Hatif, ALJAWAL and Saudi Data individually on each issue. To make me feel better, the STC representative then told me an awful story about the problems he had getting fixed lines to his own house.
I hung up the phone, despondent. Two weeks back, Saud, an acquaintance, had called to tell me that he was moving to Canada. Although he was proud to be a Saudi, he just couldn’t handle living in the Kingdom anymore. “There are too many forbiddens,” he said. “When you couple what you’re not allowed to do, with all the red tape required to get anything done, it makes life so frustrating that I am afraid I’m going to have a stroke in some government office someday. So I’m taking my family and leaving.”
Two weeks ago, Saud’s move to Canada seemed drastic, but last Wednesday morning I began to reconsider my view. Lately the news has been full of stories about women being encouraged to work from home. I must ask how women are supposed to be gainfully employed at home without adequate connectivity to the outside world? Are these ladies only allowed to open companies specializing in basket weaving or were they going to be employed in some 21st century venture such as outsourced secretarial services? Modern businesses require voice and data services and these services are inadequate in most of the Kingdom’s residential areas. In Saudi Arabia there is an enormous push right now to expand the mobile network because it is very profitable to do so. Building a wireless network is much cheaper than expanding a fixed network. The problem is that broadband data services depend on the fixed network and STC will maintain a monopoly on landlines until 2008.
In other countries, providers are talking about concepts such as “triple play,” for the consumer market. Triple play involves bringing video, voice and data into the home through a broadband connection. In Saudi Arabia, STC is stalling on enabling simple broadband for residential areas. Internet service providers are increasingly hopeless. ISPs have paid enormous sums for their operations but they can’t realize the potential of value added services without STC’s cooperation and it simply isn’t there. Since my new telephone exchange isn’t enabled for broadband, my ISP had to downgrade my service from DSL to dial-up — which will earn them less.
Where is the accountability? Your guess is as good as mine. STC as a publicly held company is only accountable to its shareholders. Its 2005 profits have so far been a 15 percent net increase over the same period last year. This must make STC shareholders’ proud, but who else benefits?
For me, there is only one thing to do. Stop depending on STC. Yesterday my husband went out and purchased a SR2,000 signal booster to put on our roof and solve the problem of receiving ALJAWAL calls inside our residence. Al-Hatif may get around to installing the fixed lines to my home someday and Saudi Data will probably upgrade my exchange to DSL in a few years, but I won’t need either the lines or the broadband.
We’ve begun to investigate the purchase of satellite equipment from one of many suppliers in the Kingdom. Later this week we’ll make our final selection. We will put the equipment up on the roof of our house and subscribe to an international satellite broadband provider, again, one of many. My family will run voice over IP services as well as data services on the connection so it won’t cost anymore than what we were paying to STC and the local ISP for telephone and DSL. The service will operate unfiltered and won’t be subject to any of the breakdowns common to the Saudi Internet. Yes, this satellite telecom connection will be against the rules and I’m sorry about that, but what choice do I have? STC has given me none.
Yesterday, early in the morning, the fixed line rang in my house. I was a bit surprised since very few people know the number. It was STC’s technician calling from outside my home.
“I’m sorry madam” the technician said. “I’m here to connect your new telephone line but I couldn’t because the DP has only two lines.” I thought I was suffering from a bit of déjà vu. “I know that,” I replied. “The DB has only two lines even though the NID is for four. Don’t you know that a technician was here last Wednesday and he couldn’t install the lines? He was supposed to report the problem to Engineering.”
“Ma’am but I don’t know anything about that,” answered the technician. “I’ll report the problem to Engineering again.”
The moral of this story is that the world in a global village. Ten point four kilometers may be the distance to the telecom dungeon in STC’s network, but it’s also the distance to connect with other international telecom providers who will give this Saudi in Saudi Arabia superior service.
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