Roaming charges for calls between Finland and Russia to drop
Finnish Minister of Communications, Suvi Lind©n and Russian Minister for Communications and Mass Media, Igor Shchegolev have hit a policy agreement on roaming charges between the two countries.
Business delegations involved in the negotiations discussed the implementation timetable and pricing schedule for roaming charges. Mobile telecommunications operators have been ordered to agree on these details by the 1st May. The roaming charge specified by the EU has been set as the reference pricing level.
According to minister Lind©n, the result of these negotiations is a major step forward for co-operation between their countries and proof that similar forms of co-operation can be used in many different areas. The price reductions will very apparent in the phone bills for all Finns and Russians using telephone or data services while travelling in either country.
The Finnish delegation is comprised of mobile telecommunications operator and equipment manufacturer representatives. The Russian delegation includes three executives from a major telecommunications company.
Spain and Portugal plan to purge Mobile Phone Roaming Charges
Spain and Portugal are planning to set a benchmark for telecommunications in the European Union by agreeing to remove cell phone roaming charges as part of efforts to promote their joint trade.
Preliminary talks have been held and the issue is set to be on the agenda of a summit meeting next month in Portugal between Jos© S³crates, the Portuguese prime minister, and his Spanish counterpart, Jos© Luis Rodrguez Zapatero.
According to Mr S³crates, such an agreement would bring a considerable benefit to joint trade and to millions of businessmen and tourists who travel across the Iberian Peninsula each year.
An agreement would also likely be welcomed by the European Commission, which has long been on a mission to require telecom operators to reduce differences in national roaming charges as well as between E.U. members to close to zero by 2015 to create a genuine single market for communications among the bloc’s 27 member states.
The European Union’s current roaming rules expire in July 2012, and the commission is to develop new proposals next spring for the period after 2012.
According to Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner responsible for overseeing telecom regulations, significant differences between roaming charges and national tariffs cannot be justified in a true single market. For her, a true digital market is a market where effective competition ensures that citizens, customers and businesses do not experience substantially different services or costs when they pass a border.
According to Spanish Industry Ministry official, it was too early to comment since the agenda of the summit meeting had not yet been completed. A roaming agreement between Spain and Portugal would also have a direct impact on telecom operators like Orange and Vodafone, which have an extensive network of European subsidiaries and are among the biggest domestic operators in both Spain and Portugal. Vodafone’s voice roaming service, set up in 2005, has more than 24 million clients across Europe, who pays a set-up fee in return for using domestic rates when abroad.
As per Simon Gordon, a spokesman for Vodafone, it did not split out roaming revenue by country and would not comment on the Portuguese-Spanish plan until such time a firm proposal or a consultative document is published publicly.
Nokia 5250: Amazing beats, Amazing Deals
Nokia has launched a new handset this week, Nokia 5250. The device has 2.8 inch TFT resistive touchscreen with 16 million colors for a better display and comes with amazing sound quality with a 3.5 mm audio jack. The internal memory of the handset is 51 MB, enough to store your favorite tracks, videos and pictures. It can be extended up to 16 GB. It also features Bluetooth, USB, EDGE communication and a 2 MP camera. Its battery backup is as good as before – 450 hours in stand by and 7 hours and 40 minutes in talk time.
The phone is also available on deals. It is available on pay as you go deals which offer users the service of best networks of UK like Vodafone, Virgin, O2, Talk-Talk, Three, Orange, T-Mobile etc. and one do not have to sign any kind of contract in these kinds of deals. Payments in these deals are made before making calls and this will help in maintaining mobile expenses.
The other deal is Nokia 5252 SIM free deals which offer the handset without any SIM card insert, hence, users can use the network and change it whenever they want to which saves money from high roaming charges.
BSNL issues Rs 150 crore recovery bill from operators (India)
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: In a major controversy surrounding the Indian telecom sector, almost all major mobile phone service providers have been accused by state owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited of not paying correct roaming charges to BSNL. A total loss of around Rs 300 crore has been estimated by BSNL and for the recovery of Rs 150 crore, the company has already issued bills in six circles across the country.
TDSAT has been approached by two companies and they have gained stay against BSNL. It has been claimed by the companies that BSNL has misinterpreted the interconnect agreement. Sanchar Nigam Executive Association (SNEA) first noticed the discrepancies in Gujarat where an alleged irregularities worth Rs 22 crore was detected by a team led by sub divisional engineers D N Shah and B G Patel.
Rs 25 per month for every subscriber are supposed to be paid by the service providers using BSNL infrastructures. According to the agreement, they have to pay only when the subscriber is actually roaming however; it has been argued by the service providers that BSNL wants them to pay for all subscribers who are registered for the roaming service.
Orange UK subscriber charged £8k on roaming for data
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: The capping of wholesale price of mobile data roaming rates in Europe does seem to work for the mobile users as a whopping amount of £8,000 was paid by one Orange UK subscriber for mobile data access while working abroad.
Orange charges £2.94 per MB for anyone travelling abroad and the student used internet believing he was entitled to 3GB of downloads under his existing tariff. That works out at €3.32 per MB, and is someway higher than the €1 per MB wholesale charge introduced by the EU in July.
Last year, a cap on wholesale data roaming charges was introduced by EU in order to cut the overall cost of roaming.
India’s state run telco BSNL joins per second billing club
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: With almost all the private telecom operators joining the tariff war in India, even the state run telcos are not far behind, with BSNL being the latest entry. The company has offered two options to the subscribers by reducing its national roaming charges- one of the offer is 49 paise per minute and the other is one paise per second.
Apart from the above two offers, there is also an offer which will charge 1 paise per second to calls on its own network and 1.2 paise per second to other networks while on roaming.
The pay per second billing system has given rise to the tariff war in India. According to BSNL chairman and managing director Kuldeep Goyal, the reason behind the slashing of roaming charges is to bring the advantage of BSNL’s network to its customers.
Roaming charges on Vodafone reduced by 50% in India
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.
EU roaming cap to stay says EU Advocate General
British Mobile operators are facing defeat in their battle against EU plans to regulate international roaming rates, after the EU’s Advocate General ruled that the price caps were valid.
Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and O2 are challenging plans by the European Commission to regulate roaming charges on voice calls.
Luis Miguel Poiares Pessoa Maduro, the Advocate General and a key adviser to the European Court of Justice, ruled recently that the regulation is in the interests of the internal market in which ‘free movement of goods, services and capital is ensured’.
His decision is non-binding but in vast majority of cases rulings by Advocate Generals are heeded by the European Court of Justice. The final ruling will be delivered over the coming months.
Maduro said in a statement: ‘The differences in price between calls made within one’s own member state and those made while roaming could reasonably be regarded as discouraging the use of cross-border services such as roaming.’
The case was referred to the European Court of Justice in 2007 by the UK High Court.
China Mobile, Larger Than Vodafone, May Say Net Rose (Update2)
Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) — China Mobile Ltd., the world’s largest cellular operator by market value, may report a 23 percent gain in second-quarter profit after adding a record number of subscribers.
The Beijing-based company, which overtook Vodafone Group Plc as the world’s largest mobile company by market capitalization last month, will report net income rose to 15.7 billion yuan ($2 billion) from 12.8 billion yuan a year earlier, according to the median estimate of six analysts in a Bloomberg survey. China Mobile is scheduled to report earnings tomorrow after the 4 p.m.market close in
Hong Kong.
Chief Executive Wang Jianzhou raised revenue by offering a wider range of wireless phone services such as movie and video downloads and targeting the more than 900 million people living in
China’s rural areas. The mobile operator added 13.1 million users in the second quarter, gaining a record number for three straight months to June.
“With the continued growth of subscribers and strong growth of data revenue,” earnings will keep rising, said Mandy Chan, who helps manage $1 billion at ABN Amro Asset Management Ltd. in Hong Kong, including China Mobile shares.
China Mobile attracted users after it received approval from the telecommunication regulator to cut rates and offer cheaper monthly packages for cell-phone users in
Beijingstarting May. The operator also reduced international roaming charges in the provinces of
Sichuanand
Zhejiang.
The phone operator is expected to report half-year profit rose to 30.2 billion yuan from 24 billion yuan a year earlier, analysts said.
Share Price China Mobile’s market capitalization on July 11 was $132 billion, compared with Newbury, England-based Vodafone’s $110 billion. The Chinese company’s shares have risen 38 percent this year, compared with a 23 percent decline in Vodafone stock.
“The share price reflects the market’s view of the prospects of the companies in the future,” Francis Cheung, an analyst at CLSA Ltd., said. “There’s more growth potential in
Chinathan in
Europe, where the market is more mature.” China Mobile, which lags behind Vodafone and
Japan’s NTT Docomo Inc. in sales, may say second-quarter revenue rose to 69.4 billion from 59.6 billion yuan a year earlier.
The company, which offers global system for mobile communications, or GSM, services, gained 25.8 million subscribers in the first six months of the year for a total of 273.8 million, about two-thirds of the nation’s mobile-phone users. That’s more than Vodafone’s 186.8 million users and Docomo’s 51.9 million combined by the end of July.
User Revenue China Unicom Ltd., the country’s second-largest mobile operator, offers services using both the GSM and code division multiple access standards. Unicom had a total of 135.1 million users at the end of June. China Mobile’s average revenue per customer, or ARPU, an industry measure of the size of a phone bill, probably remained unchanged in the second quarter from a year earlier, and up from the previous quarter, analysts said.
We expect China Mobile’s ARPU to be driven by higher usage and wireless data contribution,” Kelvin Ho, an analyst at Nomura International (
Hong Kong) Ltd. said. Ho estimates China Mobile’s ARPU will be about 90 yuan in the second quarter, unchanged from a year earlier, and up from 86 yuan in the previous quarter. Usage per subscriber probably rose 10.8 percent from a year earlier to 363 minutes per month. Chief Executive Wang, 57, is boosting revenue from new businesses such as short message services, ringtone downloads and wireless services such as emails and games.
Data Services New businesses from such wireless data services may account for 23 percent of revenue in the first six months, compared with 19.7 percent a year earlier, Ho said. Competition also eased as fixed-line phone network operators China Telecom Corp. and China Network Communications Group Corp., slowed promotions of a city-wide cordless service called Little Smart, which has cheaper rates than for cellular calls, as they prepare for the government’s issuing of high-speed wireless licenses.
Chinahasn’t set a timetable for granting licenses for 3G services, which allow subscribers to video conference and download movies faster on their handsets. The Ministry of Information Industry on Jan. 20 said it has adopted the locally developed time division synchronous code division multiple access standard as one of the so-called third- generation services. “A 3G license could be further delayed into second half 2007, which implies the 2007 could be another safe year for China Mobile, and the company could still deliver stellar results until the beginning of 2008,” Wang Jinjin, an analyst at UBS Securities Co. said in a report. China Mobile shares rose 1.5 percent to HK$52.10 as of middayin
Hong Kong, after gaining as much as 1.7 percent earlier.
Source- http://www.bloomberg.com
Technorati : China Mobile, GSM, Hong Kong, Vodafone
Ice Rocket : China Mobile, GSM, Hong Kong, Vodafone
