Omantel, the largest telecom company in the sultanate, will land five more submarine cables by the end of this year to reinforce its existing network. With this, Omantel's total tally of submarine cables will rise to nine, which is expected to create more capacity, set up a more robust network and introduce more Internet speed for the end-user.
Todd Dick, vice president of the corporate business unit of Omantel, told Muscat Daily on Monday that this will entail 'significant' investments and is in sync with the company's vision of becoming a 'carrier of carriers.'
"In the future, international traffic will be re-diverted via Omantel through the nine consortiums that we will have to carry traffic to the world," Dick said. He added that in the not too distant future, Omantel hopes to carry traffic for other regional telecom operators like Saudi Telecom, Etisalat, du and Qtel.
Speaking about Omantel's corporate business unit's performance in the past five months, Dick said that there has been an overall eight per cent increase in the number of its clients. He however, declined to give the number.
"The growth has come not only from new customers, but a lot of customers who had gone away had come back to us. This is very pleasing and is contributing to our growth, he said.
When asked if Omantel would phase out dial-up Internet connections since it has been promoting the new-age asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) packages of late, Huda al Habsi, senior manager of the corporate business unit, said that it will not happen soon since Omantel has not been able to reach out to all the populated areas in Oman with its ADSL connectivity.
"We have invested RO300mn in the past three years and have installed new switches which have so far done away with the limitation of offering customers with an ADSL only if they stay within a 5km radius of the exchange. But we still have not reached everywhere, therefore we are not in a position to end the dial-up connection now. But at the same time we will not carry out promotions for it," she said.
Omantel has been offering free upgrade from dial up to ADSL wherever coverage is available.
© Muscat Daily 2011
