Etihad Etisalat Mobily upgrades mobile Internet packages

Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) Tuesday revised prices of its innovative mobile broadband Internet packages and instituted an upward billing cap on other packages.

According to the revisions made public Tuesday, customers subscribed to low usage 5 megabyte and 20 megabyte bundles will be upgraded to 30 MB and 100 MB bundles respectively, but continue to pay the same SAR 10 and SAR25 monthly subscriptions.

Customers on high-usage 1 gigabyte and 5 gigabyte packages will not longer have to worry about shocking extra usage bills, as Mobily has now instituted an upward ceiling of SAR 500. Additional usage is charged at two riyals per megabyte above bundled data. Once a customer reaches the SAR 500 cap, his 1 GB or 5 GB bundle is not disconnected, rather can continue to connect to the Internet at no additional charge.

The new prices follow the upgrade of mobile broadband Internet speeds to 7.2 megabits/second some two weeks ago.

Mobily itself is a pioneer in the mobile broadband Internet market segment and became one of few operators in the world to launch an unlimited bundle for SAR 350 in mid-May of this year.
To crown its thrust into the broadband Internet market, Mobily signed a memorandum of understanding worth SAR 1.5 billion with Bayanat Al Oula – one of two licensed infrastructure providers – to acquire the latter’s shares.

The acquisition will allow Mobily to go beyond its current high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) based mobile broadband Internet products and offer other services based on WiMAX, a wireless technology that allows customers to do away for the need of a fixed line.

 

Nov 1, 2007