Etisalat introduces new faster internet

Dubai: Emirates Telecommunication Corporation (etisalat) will soon double the speed of wireless broadband to 14Mbps, a top company official told Gulf News.

The telecom company will roll out the enhanced speed broadband connections in the UAE and Saudi Arabia early next year. The connections will be the fastest available wireless in the Middle East.

Ahmad Mokhles, senior manager of consumer segment, said, "Most of the customers in the Middle East, especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are looking for more bandwidth and higher speed."

Currently, the company has 7.2 Mbps download and 2Mbps upload speed.

"From scanning the environment we found that there is still room for improvement.

This is why we are migrating to HSDA plus. This will give 14Mbps to 16 Mbps download speed and up to 6Mbps upload speed," Mokhles said. He added that network expansion and upgrades would be completed within the coming year.

Importance

The importance of an increased bandwidth speed would be significant for small and medium sized enterprises. "SMEs are looking for increased bandwidth speed. This proposition will affect the performance of their business," Mokhles said.

The operator has approval for rates for the new bandwidth speed.

"We have a very supportive positioning from the Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) as one of the milestones for the government is to increase the broadband penetration within the education sector."

Looking into the future, he said that most of the operators are now migrating from HSDA to long-term evolution. LTE is right now in the early stages of introduction and will mature by 2012.

"We are up to date with HSDA plus and will migrate to LTE later," he said.

For mobile broadband, the operator has 75,000 BlackBerry subscribers in the UAE and about 15,000 to 20,000 in Saudi Arabia.

All the value chain vendors are increasing data proposition by adding built-in applications in handsets.