The Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is now taking pre-booking requests for their upcoming HTC Magic, a Google Android based phone.
The phone will be sold for 2,399SR ($631) and includes a free subscription to a 12-month data plan with a limit of 1 Gigabyte each (notice that STC‘s site called it Gega).
STC will hopefully open an Android app store and add Arabic language support when the HTC Magic is released. You can read more about the HTC Magic at HTC’s website. Via Maxer.
Mobily has announced that they have extended their 3G coverage in Saudi Arabia. From AME info:
Saudi Arabia’s Etihad Etisalat Co. (Mobily) has said it has added a number of the kingdom’s Northern Province’s cities and villages to its advanced 3G network (3.5G and 3.75G) coverage. This latest addition brings to 326 the total number of cities and villages which come under Mobily’s 3.5G and 3.75G coverage.
I just came back from Jeddah and the Mobily 3G connection there was horrible: 3G isn’t working in many areas, HSDPA speed is horrible (less than 100kbps down according to speedtest.net iPhone app) and Mobily connect card can’t even connect for some reason.
STC is just as horrible with the dropped calls and horrible 902 services. Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s the weather? Who knows.
STC have opened a mirror server for hosting open source files. The server currently have mirrors for CentOS, OpenSuse, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, CPAN, MySQL and OpenOffice. This is not the first mirror of it’s kind in Saudi Arabia, The Internet Service Unit have one as well (mirrors.isu.net.sa).
Mirrors are regular file servers (HTTP or FTP) that provide a copy of a file that is closer to the person. Basically increasing the download speed and reducing the load on the main servers.
Via Yousef Raffah.
Update: There is another mirror, thanks to Abdulhadi for showing me this mirror download.net.sa provided by Bayanat, a Mobily company.
Something odd is appearing to Internet users in Saudi Arabia, random sites for no reason give the following error:
ERROR. Access Denied. Access Denied by security policy.
The security policy for your network prevents your request from being allowed at this time.
Other people on twitter reported they have the same issue and all of them are subscribers to Saudi Telecom (STC).
Strategy Analytics released their list of global penetration of broadband households. Surprise surprise, Saudi Arabia is ranked 49th on this list with only %7!
So when we look at the percentage of total households in any given country in which broadband is available (ie paid for and used), we find, not surprisingly, that Asia-Pacific countries lead the way, with Korea out in front, as it has been for many years. At the end of last year 95% of Korean households took broadband service, compared to 88% in Singapore and 81% in Hong Kong. But one or two European countries are edging towards the top of the list, led by the Netherlands (85%) and Denmark (82%).
Saudi Arabia is way behind the United Arab Emirates at 15th with 65%. This is disgraceful.
On some STC Afaq DSL connections you may encounter an error message on some websites combined with a lot of DSL disconnections. The error is:
Access Denied (license_expired)
A license has expired on the Proxy, and your request is not permitted: “The SGOS license has expired”. A new license must be obtained.
For assistance, contact your network support team.
image removed by request of owner
SGOS is a proxy server operating system by Blue Coat Systems. STC is supposed to be the leading telecommunications and Internet company in Saudi Arabia and a company of that scale shouldn’t allow important software such as SGOS to expire.
That image was found while searching for stc.com.sa on google images.
Strange problems are happening with some STC AFAQ DSL Shamil servers. It used to happen on some websites depending on your IP address. But now there is a problem with all HTTP connections on some of STC servers. You can still ping but no HTTP access.
Check your IP address from your DSL modem admin page or simply visit this website (but since you are offline then this site will be useless). If your IP address is one of the following: 94.99.119.* / 94.99.22.* / 94.99.117.* (there are others but those are the ones that I confirmed) simply disconnect and reconnect and you will get a new IP address. I have confirmed that the following IP addresses work: 77.31.250.* / 77.30.90.* / 94.97.48.*.
STC as usual isn’t helping. How can you tell them that some of their proxy servers (I assume) are broken. Just keep those IP numbers in mind.