650 TB in One Khareef: Omantel's Dhofar Network Stress Test

More than a million visitors poured into Dhofar for Khareef 2026, and nearly all of them carried a smartphone. On 11 October, Omantel published its own scorecard for the season: a record 650 TB of data, 21% more users and 45% more unique roaming users than in 2025. It is the first operator-level traffic data from this year's Khareef, and it shows how much strain Salalah's networks now carry each summer.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Omantel says total data traffic during Khareef Dhofar 2026 hit a record 650 TB, up 25% on the 2025 season, according to the company's press release published by SAMENA Council, datelined Muscat, 11 October 2026.
• Active users rose 21%, and unique roaming users during the month rose 45%, with about 292,000 unique roaming users recorded in Dhofar.
• Omantel reports that 5G user throughput rose 24% and 4G speeds rose 20%. It credits fibre upgrades, 5G densification and AI-powered network optimisation.
• All the traffic and speed figures come from Omantel itself. The only third-party measure in the release is a 79% score in a TRA survey of service quality at tourist sites and events.

📊 What Omantel Reported

The release came out on 11 October, and Telecompaper reported it on 13 October. It compares this Khareef season with last year's. According to the full release text, the season brought more than one million visitors to Dhofar. Omantel's network recorded:

Omantel attributes the result to engineering work done before the season. The release says that fibre upgrades, 5G densification, intelligent traffic management and "AI-powered network optimization have strengthened the network's capacity to respond to growing demand," as quoted in the SAMENA-published release.

🏗️ The Build-Out Behind the Numbers

The figures make more sense next to what the whole sector built before the season. In July, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) set out its Khareef readiness plan, which Oman Observer reported included:

• 29 new communication stations across Dhofar, plus 13 more along Sultan Said bin Taimur Road
• 40 existing stations upgraded to 5G
• 58 communication links with more capacity, and 30 stations with upgraded transmission lines
• 38 mobile stations placed where large visitor crowds were expected

That build-out covered all operators, not just Omantel. Even so, a 24% rise in 5G throughput while users rose 21% suggests the extra capacity kept ahead of demand on at least one network. That kind of densification is the main lever operators have when a tourist season packs a year's worth of peak load into a few weeks.

🔍 What Is New, and What the Data Leaves Out

We have covered Dhofar's networks before. In September, the TRA's own data showed fibre growth and a user-experience scorecard for the governorate, which we analysed in TRA's new Dhofar network report card. That report looked back at 2025 and compared operators on quality. Omantel's release adds something different: traffic, user and roaming volumes for the 2026 season itself.

Readers should keep a few limits in mind:

• Self-reported: Traffic, user growth and speed gains are Omantel's own measurements. The release does not explain its methods, such as the exact dates counted or how throughput was measured.
• Different survey, different score: The 79% in this release is for tourist sites and events. It is not the same number as the governorate-wide quality score in the TRA's September report.
• No rival data yet: Ooredoo and Vodafone Oman have not published comparable Khareef traffic figures. Market-wide growth therefore cannot be measured from this release alone.
• A garbled figure: The release gives daily data usage as "11,4212 GB", which looks like a typo. We have left it out.

📱 The National Picture

Khareef is a seasonal spike on top of steady growth across Oman. The latest national figures, for the end of August 2026, come from the National Centre for Statistics and Information and were reported by Times of Oman on 10 October. They show:

• 8.51 million mobile subscriptions, up 2.5% year on year, and 5.68 million active mobile broadband subscriptions
• 1.71 million IoT (machine-to-machine) connections, up 9.4%, according to Zawya's report of the same data
• 369,766 fibre-to-the-home or building subscriptions, up 6.5%, and 209,519 fixed 5G subscriptions
• 2,084 satellite broadband subscriptions, up 152.6%, the fastest-growing fixed technology

The trend matches Omantel's strategy. Earlier this year we reported on Omantel's 63.8% jump in ICT revenue in H1 2026. Strong network performance at times of national visibility, like Khareef, supports the company's claim to be more than a connectivity provider.

🇴🇲 Why this matters for Oman

Khareef Dhofar is one of Oman's main tourism draws, and visitors now expect to stream, navigate, pay and post without interruption. A 45% jump in unique roaming users shows that many of those visitors come from abroad, mostly from the GCC. Their first experience of the Sultanate's digital infrastructure happens on a mountain road outside Salalah. Network quality during these weeks shapes how Oman is seen as a tourism destination and as a digital economy, both priorities under Vision 2040. The next test is whether rival operators publish their own figures, and whether the TRA follows up with independent measurements. Then the season's performance could be judged across the whole market, not from one operator's report.