www.WirelessFederation.com/news: After remaining suspended since last August for non-payment of license fees, Togolese mobile network operator, Moov has again resumed services. The company entered the market after an agreement signed with Telecommunications Regulation Authority (ARPT) to pay license renewal fees of CFA 25.75 billion (US$48 million) over a twelve year period.

The closure of the network made 600,000 people to lose their mobile phone service. It also made many subscribers to move over to the state-owned operator, Togocel.

During the shutdown, protestors came on the street shouting slogans and carrying placards, which read “MOOV Forever And Ever” and “Prez. Faure Get Our Phone Connections Back”.

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www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Crazy John’s and Research In Motion (RIM) today announced the availability of the pink BlackBerry® Pearl™ 8110 smartphone, for $0 upfront on a $39 BlackBerry® Service Cap, the lowest bundled voice and data BlackBerry service plan in Australia’s history.

An exceptional lifestyle tool, the pink BlackBerry Pearl 8110 smartphone bundled with Crazy John’s new service plan offers an attractive choice for people who want to make calls, email, manage their organiser, surf the net, take and send photographs, listen to music, watch and record* videos, as well as access a broad range of other mobile applications.

The bundled voice and data plan allows unlimited mobile access to email, instant messaging, social networking sites, Internet browsing and thousands of other mobile applications. The unique and popular BlackBerry service enables access to up to 10 supported ISP email accounts, as well as access to various instant messaging services such as Yahoo! ® Messenger and Windows Live™ Messenger. It is also incredibly easy to stay in touch using the Facebook® for BlackBerry application. With notifications sent straight to their inbox, users will immediately know when someone tags them in a photo, writes on their wall, sends them a message or comments on their status. (more…)

Vodafone Australia’s subscriber base has reached the mark of 4 million attributed to the purchase of Crazy John. As subscriber number continues to rise, the ARPU continues to drop. According to the statistics reported, Vodafone has added more than 186,000 customers, including 76,300 from the $150 million acquisition of Crazy John’s in September. In totality, Vodafone’s subscriber base is more than 3,915,000 customers, marking a growth of 343,000 additional customers, compared to last year.
The question of concern for the operator, though, is the connection between Vodafone’s increasing subscriber base and the attrition of its total average revenue per user (ARPU). Although, the service revenue has grown 8.2% for the quarter, ARPU dropped by 2.1% compared with the same quarter in 2007.

Vodafone Australia Chief Marketing Officer John Casey said that the ARPU decline was not attributable to the addition of Crazy John’s customer base, but rather the rising ranks of 3G data customers that have been joining the telco.
“The proportion of data customers in our subscriber base is increasing and data customers have lower ARPU than voice customers,” Mr Casey said.
“So although voice customers are continuing to use their phones as much as ever, our total ARPUs are being reduced by the impact of the lower data customer ARPU.”

The increase in Vodafone’s data consuming customers has helped the cellco end its third quarter with more than 1.1 million 3G devices on the market, an increase of 49.9% in comparison to third quarter 2007.

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