​Oman will participate in the celebrations of International Telecommunication and Information Society Day on May 17, which marks the anniversary of the signing of first International Telegraph Convention and the establishment of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) way back in 1968.

The mobile phone penetration among individuals also went up to 152.2 per cent by the end of 2017, from 150.9 per cent at the end of 2016. Fixed-line Internet among households also increased to 60.1 per cent from 46.9 per cent during the period under review. The data indicated that the number of fixed line telephones by the end of 2017 reached to 320,799, from 297,094 at the end of 2016. However, the number of public telephones remained stagnant at 6,801. But the number of integrated services digital networks reached to 45,491, from 43,672 during the period under review.

The number of fixed internet protocol (IP)-connected phones increased to 122,949, from 73,377 at the end of 2016. The wireless connections reached to 1,676 lines in 2017, which is also an increase over 1,574 of the previous year. The total number of mobile phone users also went up to 6,943,910, which include 6,293,098 pre-paid and 650,812 post-paid connections. As far as Internet subscriptions are concerned, the total number of fixed line Internet users reached 351,335, of which 2,409 were low-speed Internet subscriptions (with less than 256 kbps) and 348,926 fixed-line broadband subscriptions (with more than 256 kbps). Broadband Internet users touched 4,351,583, while international Internet capacity reached 546,884 megabytes.

The number of local leased circuits, which are the lines that include everything from the transfer and reception of information and the Internet to the central branches, touched 7,917, while the subscription of telex lines reached 144.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ