Telcos end Madinah outage ‘in one hour’

RIYADH: The Kingdom’s three telecommunications providers, STC, Mobily and Zain, joined forces to overcome a mobile network outage that disrupted telecom services in Madinah on May 20.

The providers restored the entire network in an emergency operation within one hour, compared to the nine hours that others would have taken, said Saleh Bucay, who watched the operation.
He said the outage happened when several power transmission towers collapsed throwing Madinah’s telecom services out of gear.
“To guarantee the safety of mobile networks during emergencies, Saudi Arabia’s three main mobile operators have various solutions to ensure network availability at all times,” he said.
Another IT expert, Deen Mohammad, said: “Mobile telecommunication plays a major role in people’s lives, (so it’s essential) to maintain the security and stability of mobile networks. All three operators have the capability to fully guarantee the network’s safety and availability based on their operational systems during an emergency,” he said. He said mobile advancement in Saudi Arabia has improved the lives of both citizens and expatriates. “What used to be a very tedious manual communication is now a click away. You can literally fit all your transactions in your pocket with just a smartphone in hand.
The Saudi Arabia e-government projects are definitely on the right track.”
“Saudi Arabia, ranked fifth globally with a mobile penetration rate of 178 percent, has the world’s first Time-Division Duplex and Long-Term Evolution (TDD-LTE) state-of-the-art technology launched here in 2011 and 2014 respectively. The first 400G transport network also became operational in 2013,” Bucay said.
With 300 million clicks on YouTube and 150 million Twitter messages every day, tremendous achievements have taken place in Saudi Arabia’s telecom industry. Currently the country ranks No. 1 in global digitization, he said.