Iraq awards three mobile licences

THREE MIDDLE Eastern companies won 15 year licences to operate mobile phone networks in Iraq yesterday. The news puts paid to any American hopes that Cdmaone might be used instead of GSM.

The three winners were Korek Telecom which is based out of the Kurdish north of the country. Kuwait's MTC is another winner through its Atheer network and the third company is Asiacell which is partially owned by Qatar Telecommunications through the Kuwait-based National Mobile Telecommunications.

The big surprise is that Egypt's Orascom dropped out of the race - especially since it was first to offer a service through Iraqna. The network currently claims to have over one third of the country's eight million users.

Which is good going since there was virtually nothing there before 2003. The country has a population of about 26 million so around one in three already have a mobile phone.

That's hardly surprising since Iraq's fixed line network was virtually wiped out by the two US-led wars.

The three winners will have to collectively pay $3.75 billion and eventually make 45 per cent of their shares available to Iraqis.

Regular INQ readers will recall, however, that American congressman Darrell Issa of California wanted to introduce a bill that stipulated that Iraq used Cdmaone technology rather than GSM. µ

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