The competition among the main mobile telephony operators is becoming increasingly fiercer when it comes to high-speed wireless Internet access offers and to multimedia services for the mobile phone, as Orange has launched EDGE, a technology that allows for three times the speed of the traditional GPRS.
The technology is somewhere between the 2G telephony - mobile telephony services focusing on voice calls and the 3G telephony, which allows for high speed Internet access and video telephony. "We chose to implement EDGE and not move directly to 3G for cautiousness reasons. The current stage of the telecommunications market in Romania favours this approach. There are 60,000 GPRS clients we hope will migrate to this new technology, " said Yves Gauthier, Orange's commercial director. The investments in the implementation of EDGE amounted to $12 million, and were to be recovered in the next three to four years, the Orange officials specified.
Archrival Connex gave the first demonstration of the 3G technology in Romania at the end of September. Along with Siemens and Ericsson, it demonstrated a video call made possible by the third generation technology. "The investment in 3G cost us a great deal of money," Ted Lattimore, MobiFon (Connex) chairman and COO said, specifying it was about "several tens of millions of dollars. He could not verify that MobiFon was planning to launch the service in 2005. "It is too soon to be talking about this. Somebody will do something next year," he said.
At present, the fastest wireless Internet access service is that, which Zapp is getting ready to launch. The EV-DO service, slated for launch this month, according to Telemobil officials' statements, will allow for speeds of up to 2.4 Mbps. It will also facilitate multimedia services.
As for the EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) service from Orange, it becomes available as of today to the subscribers in Bucharest, Timisoara, Cluj and Brasov.
This is a first time for Romania and SE Europe as well as for Orange. Besides the Internet access, the new technology allows the mobile telephony operator to provide new services to its customers, such as live TV on the mobile phone that includes news, music, movies, horoscopes and other such multimedia products. The multimedia content can be accessed via a video streaming portal similar to the WAP portal. The content of the portal is provided by Media Pro Group and by the Mediafax news agency.
dan.dragomir@zf.ro
Pentru alte știri, analize, articole și informații din business în timp real urmărește Ziarul Financiar pe WhatsApp Channels
