Riyadh, eMedia:
The Telecommunications Sector Competitiveness Board launched lately an initiative for spreading Broad-band services to improve Internet all over the kingdom. The initiative is planned to elevate awareness and interest of both the public opinion and decision-makers concerning the importance of Broad-band and its effective role in  elevating Performance, accelerating Government Procedures, improving Education level and pushing Economic Development forward.
Dr. Sulaiman Mourad, Deputy-governor of Communications and Information Technology Commission "CICT", confirmed that objectives of this initiative are to urge all Concerned Agencies to overcome any obstacles hindering their development, affecting badly, as a result, on National economy and obstructing the Economic Openness to profitable commercial systems. This initiative has been aimed to overcome any hinders in the way of developing competitive capacities and reinforcing information economy which has been regarded as the backbone of Development nowadays, he said.
As stressed by Dr. Mourad, Broad-band is the milestone for constructing a digital Economy achieving easy communications and improving level of national and international competitiveness. This will help to prepare the Market to deal with coming generation of products and services, putting into consideration that high-speed communications will be one the primary prerequisites for business in general, he added.
With a scalable improvement, Broad band spreads in Saudi Arabia with a percentage of 9.8% at the end of the year 2009, however the service has not been as high as used in advanced countries.
The new initiative has sought to measure improvement achieved in the level of broad-band internet used throughout the 13 main Regions of the Kingdom. Such a measurement has been made through a biannual survey for internet providers continuing for two years to publish results of each survey via a media campaign and to report to the decision-makers with detailed reports.
The Board which has been patronized by CITC and financed by Competitiveness Center at SAGIA, declared results of the first phase of the initiative. Such results pointed out that Najran Region came in the first place at the three stages of survey with a growing rate of 25.98% for both the second and third quarters of 2009. On the other hand, Asseer Region came in the next place with a spread percentage of 21.28% and finally, Al-Quassim Region achieved a percentage of 20.86% to be at the third place. It noticeable that these three regions have achieved more growing percentages compared to other regions, as they are in the beginning of establishing an infrastructure for supporting spread of technologies and communications.