Wireless Broadband (WBB) is a 3-year flagship initiative of Saudi Telecom Company (STC), done in partnership with Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) to serve rural and remote areas in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, breaking the digital divide and enabling inclusion, and future prosperity to those communities.

WBB started in late 2018. It offers ICT services with an average internet access speed of 10 Mbps per each rural household, regardless of its location within the targeted areas. WBB will ensure to cover 70% of rural homes in remote villages and hamlets by 2020. The project is well under way; STC will ultimately achieve to deliver broadband access to close to 3000 remote localities, covering more than 450k households and 2.57 million inhabitants.

The overall purpose is to make sure that residents in the remote areas can participate in and benefit from today's growing knowledge and information society, improve quality of local education and foster talent development and training needs. This ensures their inclusion into the new digital era, in synergy with other parts of Saudi society. Moreover, WBB project will also facilitate development of local small business initiatives, contributing thereby to the overall long term sustainability of the communities in the remote areas in Saudi Arabia.

https://www.stc.com

• Saudi Arabia

• Youth
• Women
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Remote and rural communities

This project will be replicated by increasing the number of benefiting localities.

A wireless project delivering state of the art ICT capabilities, breaking the digital divide and opening completely new opportunities to rural residents to be included in the digital society.

This project makes sure that everyone can benefit from the opportunities that ICTs can offer by enabling and improving access to information and communication infrastructure technologies, as well as to information and knowledge.