Etisalat’s Saudi Arabian mobile broadband network- Mobily network, has surfaced as the busiest mobile data network in the world, helped by the company’s aggressive pricing, said a report from The National.

The kingdom’s second mobile services operator accounts for one-fourth of the broadband internet connections in Saudi Arabia, said Mobily Chief Executive Khalid al Kaf on Monday.

Further, it has added over more than 45,000 new mobile broadband subscribers each in the first four months of this year.

In totality, almost 33,000 gigabytes of data is consumed by users every day through the service.

Referring to the potential of broadband, Mr al Kaf said, “I think mobile broadband will thrive. It will grow so quickly that it will do to DSL, what mobile did to fixed lines.”

However, he added that, “Both of them will co-exist, but the usage behaviors will change. The customer will behave differently with mobile broadband, and I think it will overtake DSL in a short time.”

In track with its trend of introducing competitive pricing, Etisalat, on Sunday announced a striking cut in its pricing for mobile broadband, offering data downloads up to 25 times cheaper than before.

Currently, Mobily offers an unlimited mobile internet package for 350 Saudi riyals (Dh342), a 25 per cent discount on Etisalat’s Dh460 a month package.

Mobily offers five gigabytes of downloads at a price which is 33 percent cheaper than the same offering from Etisalat in the UAE.

These price cuts were targeted at boosting usage of mobile broadband in the country, wherein Etisalat believes there are 2 million internet-enabled phones, but just 100,000 mobile data subscribers, said Khalifa al Shamsi, Etisalat UAE’s vice president for consumer marketing.

The company’s UAE network has roughly half the subscribers that Mobily has in Saudi Arabia, but just one fifth of the number of mobile broadband subscribers.