Fourth MVNO enters Omani market

Samatel, Oman’s latest mobile reseller announced the launch of its services for residential and business customers on August 23. It becomes the fourth of five licensed resellers in the sultanate to introduce services.

“Samatel is a brand new concept in the sultanate, during our planning phase we went to the drawing board and decided that we don’t want to do different things but rather we will do things differently,” commented the founder and chairman Sheikh Khalid Al Mataa’ni.

Samatel is making use of an operating and technology platform provided by Effortel, a mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE).

“Samatel is 100 per cent Omani owned, has access to a country wide network of 400 retail outlets and our customers are supported locally,” said Wael Taher, the company’s CEO.

The prospects for success for Samatel, which purchases capacity from Nawras, remain questionable given the relatively small size of the Omani telecom market and the presence of a number of resellers ahead of it, a number of which have had more than a year’s head start operationally.