ALKHOBAR, 5 June 2007 — Last Sunday at nine in the morning the doorbell began ringing incessantly. In the time it took to slap on my abaya and rush outside, my eardrums were throbbing from the sound. At the gate I found a man in grubby clothes, who in broken Arabic ordered me to “move my car.” A strange request from a man to a woman in the Kingdom, but never mind. When Saudi Telecom (STC) commands, we all obey. The car was moved.
It turned out that at the spur of the moment the night before, STC had decided to lay some new cable in the street. Without giving advance notice to anyone who lived or worked in the buildings at that location, the crew arrived there the next morning to start tearing out the roadbed. So the cars were removed and the jackhammers and bulldozers moved in to start destroying the side of the recently laid street.
An hour later, in the middle of a telephone call, my Al-Hatif line went dead. Possessed by overwhelming dread, I rushed outside to see a bulldozer with a telephone cable caught in the shovel’s teeth. The wires protruding from the machine like angry tentacles, were the prelude to a nightmare.
A year earlier, another STC contracted crew had laid cable in the street to provide long awaited telephone lines. Unfortunately, they hadn’t done the work according to international standards. Instead of the cable being buried about a meter down and covered with yellow plastic, as a warning in the event of future digging in the area, the crew had laid the cable at just about 10 centimeters under the road surface. When the STC crew began digging on Sunday, the cable’s demise was inevitable.
Of course, I was furious. I wanted a supervisor, but there wasn’t one. Yes, that’s right, a crew of third country nationals was digging up a street in the Kingdom and there wasn’t a Saudi supervising at the site — not even from his air conditioned truck nearby. Talk about a breach in homeland security, such a situation is an invitation to evildoers.
After an hour, some expatriate technicians arrived wearing overalls and badges that read, “STC Network Access.” Using hand gestures, the problem was communicated to them and the technicians tried to reconnect the lines. It didn’t work. In desperation, I called 904. After waiting 20 minutes on hold, I gave up and began calling STC offices in the Eastern Province looking for the crew’s supervisor. When I finally reached a manager at an STC office, his only question was, “How did you get this number?” He advised me to call 904 and stay on the line until I could register the “service anomaly.”
Dear readers, I don’t need to bore you with the rest of the details, because most of you can guess the progression of this story. STC’s technicians never could reconnect the lines correctly. An attempt to replace the cable failed. Late in the afternoon a technician finally got the lines to work, although he admitted it was hardly in the standard manner. The old cable has been covered with electrical tape and buried again in the street, waiting for the next crew to tear it out by mistake.
When the crew cut the cable, I lost not only my fixed phone lines but also the broadband connection upon which a good portion of my job functionality depends. The broadband connection actually remained out of service for days due to some other STC problem and I had to go back to using dial-up for network connectivity. It wasn’t amusing.
STC doesn’t have detailed maps of the cables so they don’t know exactly where the telephone lines are buried when they start digging. The STC crews are contractors who are unable to communicate effectively — even among crew members. The crews are unwilling or unable to provide contacts for their Saudi supervisors, so when a problem occurs, there’s no help to be had.
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about economic, smart cities where knowledge and innovation will flourish. That requires state of the art connectivity, which must be implemented and maintained effectively. Standing in the street last week in 50 degree heat, I wondered if all the competent network access technicians had already been reassigned to the smart cities, abandoning the 23 million of us who live outside those locations.
STC generated approximately $9 billion in revenues last year. That was about 63 percent of all telecoms revenues generated in the region. STC is now planning to expand regionally and internationally. That’s an interesting move for a company that can’t do something simple competently — like lay cable in its home market. Never mind. Perhaps people in other geographies will be as accepting of STC’s service levels as Saudi consumers and businesses have had to be for so many years.
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