Saudi Arabia's Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST) has spent seven years doing something most telecom regulators talk about far more than they do: giving operators the mid-band spectrum they actually need. The payoff just showed up in the numbers. CST's fifth annual Saudi Internet Report, released this month, found a median mobile download speed of 216 Mbps nationwide — placing the Kingdom among the top five G20 economies on that metric, alongside average per-person mobile data consumption of 53 GB a month, roughly triple the global average (CST, Saudi Internet Report 2025).
Five Auctions, One Strategy
That performance is not an accident of geography or a lucky vendor contract. It is the direct output of a regulatory choice: release mid-band spectrum faster and in larger blocks than almost anyone else. CST ran its fifth IMT spectrum auction in November 2024, awarding 310 MHz across the 600 MHz, 700 MHz and 3800 MHz bands to Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Mobily and Zain — the Kingdom's only three qualified bidders — lifting total licensed mobile spectrum from 1,110 MHz to 1,400 MHz (CST auction announcement). STC and Mobily each picked up an additional 100 MHz in the 3800 MHz band alone, on top of their existing 3.5GHz holdings (MEA TechWatch). That is the band that actually carries most 5G traffic, and it is scarce almost everywhere else: regulators from Brussels to New Delhi have spent years litigating band plans, coordination zones and incumbent clearance costs before a single megahertz reaches an operator. CST, by contrast, has now run five mid-band auctions since 2018 and extended the usable 3.5GHz range up toward 4.0 GHz — matching, rather than trailing, the U.S. and Japanese band plans that global equipment vendors already build for.
The Case for Caution, Stated Fairly
Critics of fast, revenue-maximizing auction cycles have a real point, and it deserves stating plainly before dismissing it. A market with exactly three qualified bidders in every auction round is a market where new entrants are effectively locked out, and where auction proceeds — which flow to the state rather than into network buildout — can function as a hidden tax that operators eventually pass through to subscribers. Regulators who spread out spectrum releases, or attach coverage and affordability conditions to licenses, are trying to solve a problem CST has largely sidestepped: that raw speed gains in dense urban corridors (5G already reaches over 98% of Saudi Arabia's urban population) can mask persistent gaps in smaller towns and rural governorates that a headline national median obscures. Proportionate spectrum policy should mean both fast release and enforceable universal-service conditions, not just the former.
Still, the counterfactual is instructive. Markets that ration mid-band spectrum to protect incumbent revenue or manage clearance politics — a pattern visible in parts of the EU and South Asia — routinely produce congestion, not fairness. Scarcity does not distribute itself equitably; it just makes everyone's connection worse while doing little to seed genuine competition. CST's volume-first approach at least converts spectrum scarcity from a policy failure into engineering headroom, which operators can then compete on quality and price to fill.
Fast Pipes Are Not an Open Internet
Where the Kingdom's record looks far less defensible is on what travels over those pipes. Since late April 2026, Meta has geo-blocked more than 100 Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to human rights researchers and NGOs — including ALQST for Human Rights and Democratic Diwan — from reaching audiences inside Saudi Arabia, at the explicit request of Saudi authorities, citing local cybercrime-law compliance (ALQST/Access Now joint statement). A parallel pattern has played out on X against Saudi activists. This is the uncomfortable pairing that a purely infrastructure-focused reading of CST's numbers elides: a 216 Mbps median connection delivers exactly nothing for speech rights if the platforms riding on top of it are geo-fencing dissent at the state's request.
What Other Regulators Should — and Shouldn't — Copy
The lesson for spectrum regulators elsewhere is narrow but real: mid-band scarcity is a self-inflicted wound, and CST's release cadence is a legitimate model for jurisdictions still sitting on unassigned 3.5GHz capacity while operators throttle capacity-constrained networks. That is a genuinely pro-growth, low-controversy reform other markets — including EU member states still finalizing 26 GHz auctions and Indian circles awaiting further C-band release — could adopt without importing anything else about the Saudi regulatory model. What should not travel with it is the assumption that infrastructure liberalization and platform censorship are separable problems for a single regulator to manage independently; a publication committed to the open internet has to hold both facts at once — the spectrum policy is worth emulating, the platform-compliance pattern is worth condemning — rather than let one launder the other.