Integrated Telecom Company (ITC) today announced that it has invested more than SR 1 billion in building its own network infrastructure necessary to offer its basic and advanced data communication services through setting up 2 international gateways by venturing with Flag Telecom, deploying an optical fiber backbone network referred to as Saudi National Fiber Network (SNFN) over 12,500 km spanning across all major cities in the Kingdom, installing tens of wireless base stations, establishing high-capacity data centers and laying fiber rings in Riyadh, Jeddah, Khobar and Dammam.
“Building such a state-of-the-art network infrastructure will bring the Saudi telecom industry into a new era, enabling us to deliver a portfolio of distinguished data communication services and offer high speed and secure data communications to corporations, governmental agencies and individuals”, said Waleed Al-Abdulsalam, VP, PR and Communication, ITC.
“As we completed most of our network infrastructure and internal support systems, we are ready to launch our first set of core services in the Saudi data communication market. Our service portfolio is augmented by unrivalled quality standards and service level agreements to address the national and international market requirements in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector”, added Al-Abdulsalam.
Among the data communications services ITC is planning to launch during this month are Internet bandwidth services to service providers and operators via FALCON Marine Cable, Internet access and inter-branch connectivity services to private and public organizations using copper, wireless and fiber optic access media, last mile access through WiMAX technology targeted towards service providers in addition to collocation services by virtue of our environmentally controlled data centers.
ITC’s investment criteria in such large projects comes in line with its efforts to support the national information and communication technology initiatives announced by the Saudi Government to establish a technically advanced society.
To that effect, ITC has played a strong leading role in supporting the “Smart Cities” program initiated by High Committee for the Development of Riyadh in collaboration with the Communication & Information Technology Commission (CITC). ITC completed the installation of the first “hot zone” in Prince Mohammed bin Abdul-Aziz street, Riyadh, by integrating WiFi with WiMAX – the latest wireless broadband technology adopted worldwide, offering the street visitors free Internet access during the project pilot period.
Among ITC’s key objectives, Al-Abdulsalam explained, is to proactively participate in transforming the Saudi society into a digital one by supporting all national and private ICT initiatives, increasing the broadband penetration substantially, thus encouraging investment in content, applications and triple play service offerings (voice, data and video).
Furthermore, ITC aims to play an instrumental role to develop the Saudi telecom industry to cope with the economic growth witnessed in Saudi Arabia and expected to continue for years to come.
“We pay close attention to support the e-government program, and participate in the telecom infrastructure build up of the new mega economical and industrial cities”, added Al-Abdulsalam.
This comes in sync with the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) long-term strategic objective to have advanced telecom infrastructure deployed all over the Kingdom that satisfies the requirements of global and multinational corporations – willing to invest in KSA – in terms of access to a high-capacity, reliable data communications and service delivery platform.
