How many cities have you covered with WiMAX services so far in Saudi Arabia?
We have covered 9 cities so far, for the residential as well as the enterprise market. This includes Riyadh and Jeddah. More than 80% of the population resides in these 9 cities. There is still a lot of work to be done in these 9 cities. Maravedis: What is your major WiMAX investment so far and what kind of investments are you currently making in WiMAX? Around Q4 2006, we signed an agreement with Samsung to deploy 400 base stations based on the 802.16e-2005 standard. The value of the contract including CPEs and other services is US$100 million. The number of CPEs in the contract is 200,000. The CPEs will be deployed gradually. It is like—as we sell, we buy. For this network, we have invested about US$50 million in actual rooftop sites and backhauling between them. We have invested another US$50 million for our back-office facilities in data centers—POPs, software, and the BSS/OSS. We are currently expanding our network with 400 Samsung base stations, and very soon we will start a very
