Technology and telecom

Today, technology and telecom are intertwined. The telecommunications and technology ecosystem in Oman consists of many stakeholders, including government organizations, service providers, content and application providers, equipment manufacturers, cloud computing/data centers providers, etc. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) oversees all of these stakeholders and sets out standardized policies. It is responsible for formulating various standards and specifications for equipment used by licensees for providing telecom and internet services.

Oman has established itself as one of the most progressive telecom sectors in the region in terms of liberalization and the promotion of competition in recent years. A total of seven network operators cater to a population of approximately four million.

Oman has an extremely high mobile phone penetration, at 131% for voice mobile phones and 104.4% when it comes to mobile internet. This means Oman has 31% more cell phone connections than it does people. The monthly average data usage per subscriber in Oman is 5.58GB.

During COVID-19, the telecoms market experienced a higher demand for services with lockdown and lower average spend due to some special offers by service providers as compared to previous quarters.

There was a 29.4% growth in total mobile phone usage, although active mobile telephone subscriptions dropped by 5.6%. There was a 46% drop in total fixed line usage, and a 19.22% reduction in the average spend (revenue) presubscription.

When it comes to data consumption there was a 27.61% growth in total mobile broadband usage (mobile data) although active subscriptions dropped by 8.72%. Fixed broadband usage grew 31.8% in terms of total GBs consumed.

The total domestic mobile minutes represented 72.1% on net, 23.5% off net and 4.3% mobile to fixed. On net ratio can be justified by the competitive promotional packages per calls offered for the same network.

The transformative power of the combination of telecom with technology was shown during the peak of lockdown. ICT services helped enterprises and government entities across the sultanate to remotely collaborate and work efficiently from home during the pandemic.

In December last year, Oman’s first 5G network was launched. In future, this will contribute to various sectors including education, healthcare, oil and gas, tourism, transportation, entertainment, etc. This is attributable to the massive speeds of this new technology and its close-to-zero latency, which enables the introduction of the 4th industrial revolution technologies such as virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. The maximum benefit of this new technology may still take a long time to achieve.