Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Technology has announced that six Arab and foreign companies have submitted their bids for the country’s third mobile license before the deadline.

As per the country’s assistant minister of telecommunications and technology Mohammad al-Jalali, the companies in the framed consideration are: UAE-based Emirates Telecommunications Corporation (Etisalat), Mobily Saudi Arabia, Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Qatar Telecom (Qtel), Turkish firm Turkcell, France Telecom (FT) and TAMCO of Iran.

The six applicants will now have their tenders evaluated by a committee from the Ministry with the participation of a German advisory company, and two candidates will be chosen to go to the next stage.

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Adding a new spice to the latest tariff war in the world’s fastest-growing cellular market, India, Vodafone Essar, reduced its roaming charges by more than 50% besides offering the option for per-second pulse.

The pay per second plan launched by TATA DoCoMo has made the other operators to join the war.  Some are even coming up with other lucrative plans like 50 paise per minute, for all types of calls, local as well as roaming by Reliance Communications and to 60 paisa per minute roaming charges by Bharti Airtel.

Though the customers are benefiting a lot from this tariff war, the mobile operators are losing out on revenues. The stock prices of listed telecom operators like Bharti Airtel, RelCom and others are sliding.

One of the major reasons behind this war is to attract the new users as new operators are entering the market. Norway’s Telenor launch made it the 12th operator playing in the Indian market while, Arab’s second-biggest carrier Etisalat is planning to enter India.

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