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Syria Telecom News
Syria: EUR 100 million loan for
telecom upgrade (From menareport.com, December 19, 2005)
- The Facility
for Euro-Mediterranean Investment and Partnership (FEMIP) is granting a EUR
100 million loan for the extension of the fixed line telephone network to
poorly served areas of Syria.
The project
referred to as the “third rural telecoms project” will connect 430,000
new customers across 4,300 villages located in mostly rural areas across
the country to the telephone network through the installation of suitable
access technologies based on copper, fiber or wireless solutions. The
project will be implemented and managed by the Syrian Telecommunications
Establishment (STE).
This is the
first telecom sector operation signed under FEMIP in the Mediterrannean region. The finance contract was signed
on 16 December 2005 in Paris by Mr Philippe de Fontaine Vive, EIB Vice-President in
charge of FEMIP, and Dr. M. Bachir Munajed, Minister of Communications and Technology for Syria.
30 Syrian lawyers
call for cellular boycott (From
The Daily Star, August
30, 2004)
- Some thirty Syrian lawyers have
called for a cellular boycott on Sept. 6, exactly three years after former
deputy Raid Seif was arrested for denouncing in
Parliament a mobile phone contract.
The lawyers hope mobile phone users will turn off their phones on that date
for three hours from 3pm
to 6pm to protest the
high cost of monthly charges.
"All citizens, civil associations and organizations for the defense of
human rights should stand together and send out a strong message to annul
the monthly charges and an amend mobile phone contracts to safeguard the
rights of the state and citizen," said Me Anouar
Bounni, a human rights activist.
Two similar cellular boycotts were organized in Lebanon since July and a third
boycott is planned for Aug. 16.
Orascom completes ownership pull out
from Syriatel (From menareport.com, July 21, 2003)
- Orascom
Telecom Holding (OTH), the leading GSM telecommunications and Internet
services operator in the Middle East has
completed the agreed transaction to dispose of its stake in Syriatel after settling a legal dispute with its local
shareholder, Drex Technologies, reported Al-Iqtissadiya.
Egypt-based OTH founded the Syrian mobile company in 2001 in cooperation
with Drex. The agreement, reached on July 16,
2003, settles a dispute over an Orascom
allegation, submitted in October, that Drex was
making use of its political affiliations to take over the company. The
settlement has resolved all legal disputes and litigation in international
and Syrian jurisdictions.
OTH will no longer hold any shares in Syriatel
and will receive cash consideration to compensate for OTH’s
initial investment, loans made to Syriatel and
expenses incurred. OTH will continue to provide management expertise to Syriatel on a contract basis for a management fee.
In early 2001, the Syrian government awarded a 15-year build, operate and
transfer (BOT) GSM license to Syriatel, a joint
venture 25 percent owned by OT and 75 percent held by various Syrian
investors. A second GSM network Spacetel is
operated by Investcom, a Lebanese-Syrian joint
venture.
OT wins
Syrian GSM (from itp.net, March 23, 2001)
Orascom Telecom subsidiary SyriaTel won the bid
to build, operate and transfer (BOT) a GSM network in Syria. The
Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, who put the bids out in September
last year, announced in January. A second BOT licence
was awarded to Lebanese company Investcom. With
a population of over 16 million, three of which reside in the capital city,
Damascus, and with its prominent role in the
Middle East, Syria
is definitely a very important market for OTs
regional strategy, said chairman Naguib Sawiris.
The fifteen year BOT contract requires an up front
payment of frequency fees of US $20 million for the GSM 900 MHz network,
and an additional $15 million are to allow the operator to use the GSM 1800
MHz frequency bands, OT says in a prepared statement. The contract also
defines a revenue sharing agreement. OT is obliged to transfer 30% of the
revenues of the first three years, 40% of revenues generated of the second
three years and 50% of the revenues of the remaining contract period.
SyriaTel is already running one of two trial networks in Syria,
serving more than 11,000 subscribers in the main cities. OT hopes to sign
up 75,000 customers in Syria
the first year, after a network investment of US $60 million. By the end of
the project, OT projects more than 850,000 users, according to the
statement.
The company wasnt as successful in the
bid for a GSM licence in Nigeria. OT
pulled out when the bid reached an amount of $285 million. Sawiriss
statement after the decision was short: We found, however, that the auction was
exercised by the Nigerian government in a very professional and transparent
manner.
Analysts said the auction of four telecommunications licences in Nigeria, the most populous
nation in Africa with 120 million people,
marks the birth of telecommunications in Nigeria. Other West African
states are expected to follow Nigerias move towards liberalisation soon.
Four companies qualified to pay $285 million for a
license: state-owned Nigeria Telecommunication (NITEL); Communication
Investments Ltd.; Econet Wireless Nigeria; and
MTN Nigeria Communications Ltd. The auction brought in US $1.14 billion for
government coffers; only Morocco
comes close to bringing in so much money for telecommunication licences: $1 billion.
But these companies still face the task of providing
telephone services to a country with a 4% density (only 4 out of 100 has a
telephone line), which is well below Africas overall density of
12. Local reports said fewer than 500,000 of the 700,000 fixed telephone
lines in the country are functioning, and only 30,000 of 810,000 NITEL
mobile lines are in working condition.
Perhaps OT can count itself lucky that the company
now can focus efforts on its GSM operations in Egypt,
Jordan, Syria, Yemen,
Pakistan, Cote dIvoire,
Zimbabwe, Zambia, Togo,
Burundi, the Central African Republic, Benin, Niger,
Gabon, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Burkina Faso, Uganda
and DRC in Sub-Saharan Africa!
Arab firms win 15-year Syria
mobile phone network contract (from Bahrain Tribune, January
19, 2001)
DAMASCUS (AFP)
— The Syrian-Egyptian SyriaTel and Lebanese
Investcom companies were jointly granted a 15-year
mobile telephone exploitation concession in Syria, an official daily said
yesterday.
According to the specialised Website Cellular
News, the two companies beat out Turkish mobile operator Telsim.
SyriaTel and Investcom
were awarded on Wednesday a build-operate-transfer (BOT) license by an ad
hoc ministerial committee chaired by Vice Prime Minister Khaled Raad, and
are due to install 85,000 lines, said the Al Baath
newspaper, which added that work should start "as soon as the
contracts are signed."
Investcom, a branch of the Lebanese group Mikati, and SyriaTel, which
comprises the Egyptian company Orascom and Syrian
partners, had installed an experimental mobile phone network in Syria in
February. The two companies had spent $31 million on this initial mobile
network, which was set up in Damascus,
Aleppo, and
Latakia for a trial period of one year.
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