Teliasonera now invests in Nepal Satellite

Teliasonera, the parent company of Ncell having 60.4% stake, now has indirect investment in another Mobile operator in Nepal, Nepal Satellite Telecom(hello mobile). It has indirectly acquired 51 percent of the shares in the Cypriot holding company Airbell Services Ltd.(Cyprus based company), which owns 50 percent of the shares in Rural telecom operator Nepal Satellite Telecom Pvt. Ltd which is going to operate GSM mobile all over Nepal.

Though Nepal Satellite Director Ajay Sumargi found unaware of the purchase, Teliasonera has the Rs 2.13 Billion (170 Million USD) acquisition of Nepal Satellite which is equivalent 50,000 Shares in the company, included in its 2011 annual report. Nepal Satellite currently holds 14.6 MHz GSM frequency (5.6 in 900 + 9 in 1800) with 1 lakh Customers in Rural Area of Mid Western Developement Region (MWDR). And with the license, it can operate GSM mobile all over Nepal.

Recent withdrawal of some shares in Cambodia, Teliasonera has announced it will increase its ownership in Ncell. With such announcement and acquirement, Teliasonera is going to stay firm in Nepal, and the competition will be more tough for the government owned Nepal Telecom to stay in No. 1 Telecom operator. But as there is no provision of Spectrum sharing in Nepal, it is unknown how this acquirement will have effect in the telecom scenario of Nepal.

Source: www.nepalitelecom.com

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Nepal Telecom to deliver high speed Internet service through WiMax.

Nepal Telecom is all set to start the work of 4G WiMax project with a US based Company named Airspan. After receiving the Spectrum in 2.3 GHz by NTA (Nepal Telecommunication Authority) without any trouble last year, and this current contract with Airspan, NT will deliver high speed wireless data services throughout Nepal within a year. Four Telecom Vendors ZTE, Huawei, Airspan and PointRed vied for executing this project, out of which Airspan won the competition to roll out the 780 million Rs Project to all municipalities and VDCs. This project will be separated into two parts, one towards the west covering 1,923 VDCs and 24 municipalities, another in the west covering 2,092 VDCs and 34 municipalities.

NT has also planned to provide at least 256 kbps of data speed (uplink and downlink) to its customers in remote and city areas.Currently NT has ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscribers line), WCDMA (Wideband CDMA), EVDO (Evolution Data Only), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), PDSN (Packet Data Serving Node) technologies to provide internet service to its customers.

WiMax is a wireless broadband access technology for delivering high speed internet to a Wide Area, offering maximum throughput of 75 Mbps. Though the concept of using base station and the core part to deliver the service is same, it is taken as completely different to the existing cellular technology used for mobile communication. Currently, WiMax is battling out with another 4G technology LTE Advanced to be the superior technology for delivering high Speed Internet but none of them is the winner till now.

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