Most Saudis have at least one mobile subscription

The number of mobile subscriptions in Saudi Arabia at the end of 2012 stood at 53 million, the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) said in its latest quarterly report.
At more than 86 percent of the total, prepaid subscriptions make up the great majority of these.
This makes the mobile phone penetration rate stand at 181.6 percent of the population. This means that most citizens of Saudi Arabia have at least one mobile subscription.
The report said that starting from the third quarter of 2012, the number of subscriptions went down, as a result of a government requirement mandating that charging prepaid phones must be tied to an ID number.
A number of companies deactivated subscriptions that belonged to unidentified people.
By the end of 2012, the number of Internet users went up, reaching 15.8 million, the report said. Internet penetration was very high in recent years, where it stood at 54.1 percent of the population by the end of 2012, up from 5 percent in 2001.
The report said that expenditures on communications and information technology services reached around SR 94 billion in 2012.