By A Staff Reporter - MUSCAT — With the fast roll-out of its network, Oman Mobile 3.5G network now has the widest 3.5G coverage in the Sultanate as the company completed the installation of 747 base stations up to the end of August. At the same time, more expansion works are under way in order to extend the coverage to reach more customers. Ahmed bin Mohamed al Nasry, General Manager of Network Development at Oman Mobile, said the company exerts great efforts in rolling out the 3.5G network beyond cities and main areas to also cover the more remote regions as part of a preset expansion plan.

Al Nasry said: “Considering that our 3.5 G network was launched in the first quarter of 2009, but it now covers vast geographical areas of the Sultanate's regions. Oman Mobile has completed the first phase of the expansion and embarked on the second to cover various parts of the Sultanate.” He noted that the company has already built 747 stations which cover 59 per cent of the populated areas in the Sultanate.

Meanwhile, it is in the process of adding more stations in the near future to increase the number to 898 stations by the end of this year. The network assures residents of remote areas high speed access to the Internet as hundreds of stations have been added up to the network and new tens of villages and cities were reached since the beginning of this year. In addition to these permanent stations, Oman Mobile possesses several mobile stations that can be mobilised in order to boost the network in certain densely populated areas or during special events, exhibitions or seasons such Salalah Tourism Festival and Muscat Festival.

These mobile stations help prevent any interruption of the network due to the increased demand on the services compared to normal times, Al Nasri concluded. The 3.5G network from Omantel provides several services like mobile Internet, video calls, mobile TV and interactive games. The mobile broadband Internet through the 3.5G network helped to support the government efforts to disseminate the digital culture and enabled hundreds of thousands of customers to use the Internet on the go as the network has covered several new regions in the Sultanate where no Internet service was available before.

The success of the mobile broadband Internet was crowned by Oman Mobile's announcement last May that the number of mobile broadband subscribers over Hayyak on the daily package (141) jumped to more than 100,000 in addition of tens of thousands in other mobile broadband packages. Oman Mobile is the first and main provider of mobile telecommunications services in Oman. It owns the largest mobile network that was launched on November 1996. The company works diligently on the development and expansion of the network through the introduction of high quality services and latest technologies. It now covers around 97 per cent of the populated areas and serves more than 2.3 million subscribers in various regions of the Sultanate.