Orange Tunisia in partnership with local company YouVas has launched an App store featuring over 20 locally developed applications as well as intenational ones such as Roland Garros 2011, Jardins de Versailles and Coach Forme.

It offers a 70% revenue share to developers and gives them 50 percent of the ad space to promote their products.

Several of the first apps that went live were developed by Tunisian students under the Orange DevCenter initiative to support end-of-studies projects. These include Orange Viewer, Citations, Orange Services and Orange Info Plus.

Tunisiana has picked French QoS and network performance monitoring services provider Astellia to optimise data network through data service and QoE audit.

The data service and QoE audit involved placing Astellia’s probes on strategic points of Tunisiana’s network both on the access and the core parts.

The analysis was performed in three stages. The first step consisted in getting an assessment of network performance and service quality as perceived by subscribers. These metrics were then benchmarked versus regional reference KPIs.

Finally, the implementation of Astellia’s recommendations enabled Tunisiana to improve customer experience. Amongst others, access time to data services was reduced by more than 30 percent by identifying delays due to packet loss at GGSN level.

The push-mail application efficiency was improved by reconfiguring core network equipment and service continuity was enabled for subscribers moving from mobile to mobile.

Orange Tunisia has introduced the “Music Play” service to enable customers on its prepaid Club, Zen and Play plans to personalise their phone’s ring back tones, heard by callers instead of a standard dial tone.

The operator offers a broad range of music from the Universal, Arabica Music and Founoun Jazeera labels, including Tunisian songs, Bollywood music, hip hop, rap, jazz, religious chants, TV theme tunes and classical music.

Music Play allows subscribers to have up to 10 ring back tones on their playlist, which can be assigned to specific callers’ numbers or played randomly. Until the end of May, Orange Tunisia is offering the first month subscription for free and a reduced IVR browsing fee of US$0.1 per minute.

Tunisie Telecom has launched Serenity Pro, a postpaid mobile service with plans ranging from 5 to 30 hours of calls per month to all national destinations.

Serenity Pro customers benefit from a 100 percent bonus every month on calls to Tunsise Telecom fixed and mobile and Elissa mobile numbers, and a 500 SMS welcome package.

Customer scan also sign up for the Passport Option, offering an up to 50 percent discount on international calls. The operator has launched a Serenity Pro bundle with a BlackBerry Gemini 8520 smartphone, 30 hours of calls to all national numbers and unlimited calls to Tunisie Telecom numbers.