Zain Saudi Arabia said it will launch commercial services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabiais on Tuesday (August 26).

With the launch, the Kingdom joins and connects to ‘One Network’, Zain's mobile service covering more than 45 million Zain customers in 16 countries, said a top company official.

“The attractiveness of and continual expansion of the ‘One Network’ will play a key role in Zain attaining its year 2011 targets of attaining 150 million customers and being a top-ten global mobile operator,” noted Zain Group CEO Dr Saad Al Barrak.

At launch date, Zain’s coverage area will cover 95 per cent of the Kingdom’s population with its state-of-the-art mobile network, he explained.

The telecom group will initially cover 53 per cent of the population in 36 major cities and 14 highways spanning over 4,000km.  

The remaining coverage area will be attained initially through a complimentary countrywide roaming service, he added.

Zain will introduce high-speed 3.5G broadband technology to approximately half of the Saudi population offering the latest 3.5G services that include television, video-calling, rich multimedia content and even faster internet access.

Zain’s network will be further expanded in stages to eventually cover the entire Kingdom, he said.

Dr Marwan Alahmadi, CEO of Zain in Saudi Arabia said the company has committed investments of over $1.5 billion in the development of the network.

Recently the operation undertook a long testing phase with 9,000 mobile users that proved invaluable.

'It gave our technical staff and customer care personnel the sufficient understanding and experience to improve and finesse many of the services that makeup our world-class network.'

'We have invested heavily and we are now ready for the challenges ahead, confident of success. We are targeting equal market share along with the two existing operators in the years ahead,' he added.-TradeArabia News Service