Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Top ISPs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

by Eric Michel Yunis Online Front Business Development Director [February 19, 2003]

This ISP ranking is based on the number of users, both residential and business, as well as the ISP's bandwidth use. As of January 29, 2003, 22 ISPs were active in Saudi Arabia, down from 28 in 2002 and 42 in 1999.

Cyberia is a ragional ISP operating in Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Atheer is part of Batelco and operates in five nations. The ISPs Dallah, TRInet, and Cyberia merged and kept the name Cyberia.

Al Alamiah, AwalNet, and Nassej merged and kept the AwalNet name.

The Advanced Telecom Company (ATC) provides a wide variety of services, and the top ISPs in Saudi Arabia have partnered with it to release a Multi Communication Access Card that can be used to purchase ISP service, unified messaging, Web products and services, a multi-language e-mail reader, and other services offered by ATC.

Since many subscribers use prepaid Internet cards instead of signing up for dialup contracts, subscriber numbers in Saudi Arabia can fluctuate rapidly. The Saudi population is young (see stats below), and ISPs therefore expect rapid subscriber growth in the future.

DSL services were only recently introduced to Saudi Arabia, and there are no reliable numbers for wireless Internet services. There are 5,927 dedicated broadband accounts (including leased lines, frame relay, and DSL). ISPs currently use 560,650 modem ports.

The Internet population is described in the following charts:

For readers who need more information on Saudi Arabia, according to the CIA World Fact Book, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has:

Population: 23,513,330, including 5,360,526 non-nationals
(July 2002 est.).

42.4 percent of the population is 14 years old or younger (compared to 21 percent for the United States) making the Saudi population a very young one.

Telephones: 3.1 million land lines plus 1 million cell phones (1998)

Internet Users: 570,000 (2001)

—End