The Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) announced a total revenue of $18.9 billion from its operations by the end of 2017, down 2.25 percent from the previous year.
"Despite shrinking economic growth in line with declining oil prices, revenues from telecom service providers maintained their rates over the past three years," said CITC in a recent report.
The Commission said it conducted an analytical study to estimate the volume of spending on ICT services in the country, including telecommunications, IT, hardware and software services.
It concluded that spending in the country is estimated at $36.2 billion, at a growth rate of about 4.6 percent over 2016, and spending on telecommunications services accounted for about 65 percent of total expenditure.
It indicated that Internet services had increased at a high rate over the past years, rising from 64 percent in 2014 to 82 percent at the end of 2017.
CITC estimated the number of Internet users in Saudi Arabia at more than 26 million, noting that the demand on Internet and broadband services recently increased, with high demand for on demand channels and other applications like YouTube, Snapchat and online games.
The subscriber is now looking for higher speeds and larger loading capacities which, according to the report, extensively contributed to an increase in the amount of data used in the past years.
The total number of international Internet connectivity capacity increased from 3185 GB per second in 2016 to 5260 GB per second at the end of 2017, an increase of 65 percent which CITC attributed to the expected demand for Internet usage and companies' inclination to allocate parallel capacities to the capacities used as an alternative in case of any Internet interruption.
Subscriptions to fixed broadband services, including digital lines and fiber optics, stood at 2.5 million at the end of last year. The Commission added that the total subscription of broadband services through mobile networks reached about 29.7 million by the end of the last year.
