Mobily outsources network through a managed services agreement with Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei

The three international telecom companies will provide operation, maintenance, network optimization, spare parts management and technical support for Mobily's multi-vendor mobile network for three years.

The three companies will support Mobily's efforts to boost the overall efficiency of its network operations and maintenance, as well as reduce its network operating costs while improving the overall reliability of the network, thus enabling Mobily to meet its customers' fast-growing demand.

"To consistently and reliably meet our customers' expectations, it's imperative for us to ensure a high level of network availability and performance but at the same time we need to minimize our operating costs, for this reason we have signed the managed services agreement," said Mobily CEO Khalid Al-Kaf. "We want to focus more on customers, by applying the most recent trends in the world, that is, outsourcing the network."

Mobily which started operations in mid of 2005, has been able to capture around 38% of the market share in less than three years in the biggest telecom market in the Middle East.

It has also been able to extend its 2.5G, 3G, and 3.5G/HSDPA network to cover all the cities in the biggest GCC country at the cost of $1.5bn, establishing the state of the Art network enhanced by a modern fiber optic network.