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Orascom receives mobile licence in North Korea

  • January 31st, 2008
  • 2:33 pm

Mobile operator Orascom Telecom has been granted a commercial licence to provide mobile telephony services in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea using WCDMA technology. The licence has been granted to Orascom’s subsidiary Cheo Technology which is controlled by Orascom Telecom with an ownership of 75 percent while the remaining 25 percent is owned by the state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications. The terms of the licence allow Cheo to offer services to its customers throughout the country. The duration of the licence is 25 years with an exclusivity period of four years. Orascom Telecom intends to invest up to USD 400 million in network infrastructure and licence fees over the first three years in order to rapidly deploy a high-quality network and offer voice, data and value added services at accessible prices to the Korean people. OTH intends to cover Pyongyang and most of the major cities during the first twelve months of operations.

   

Possession of a mobile is a capital crime

  • June 15th, 2007
  • 11:32 am

The Korea Institute for National Unification, a South Korean government think tank, has claimed that the number of people publicly executed in North Korea for owning a mobile phone is on the rise, without giving numbers. Cellphones have been banned since June 2004 following an alleged assassination attempt on the ruling dictator Kim Jong-Il, in which an explosion on a train was thought to have been detonated by a mobile phone. Prior to this there was a GSM network in the capital Pyongyang built by Loxpac (Loxley-Pacific, a Thai-Finnish-Taiwanese joint venture) and operated by subsidiary Northeast Asia Telephone and Telecoms (NEAT&T) under the banner SUN NET. This was shut down following the train explosion, which occurred only a month after mobile phones had been made legal. While today no network is available to the general public, many phones are smuggled across the border from China, where the Chinese phone networks are reported to have an unusually strong signal strength which reaches deep inside the North Korean border zone.