The Qtel Group has announced its intentions to launch mobile money services throughout its international operations, covering a regional footprint of 17 countries across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, and serving a subscriber base of more than 53 million customers.

Qtel’s mobile money proposition includes secure international mobile remittance, mobile payment and mobile recharge facilities. The group hopes to capitalise on the millions of dollars remitted from the Gulf region to Asian countries ever year by expatriate workers.

"There is a significant community of under-banked and unbanked segments in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, and mobile money services will play an increasingly important role in addressing their needs,” commented group chief executive Nasser Marafih.

“With our presence across this region, and strong connectivity with key remittance markets such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines, we are confident that the Qtel Group can play a key role in delivering mobile money services in a compelling and cost-effective manner,” he added.

Research from leading group Gartner suggests that more than three billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or other Internet-based technology by 2014. India is one of the world’s biggest recipients of remittances, alongside China, with the total value of remittances reaching about US$50 billion by 2008. The total value of remittances to the Philippines was a record-setting US$16.4 billion in the same year.

Other operators already providing or intending to launch m-commerce services in the region include Zain, MTN, Safaricom, Etisalat, Viva and Vodafone.

Gulf Bridge International (GBI), the Middle East’s first privately-owned submarine cable operator and Du have signed an agreement whereby the UAE operator will be the landing party for GBI’s new submarine cable through Du’s newly built Fujairah Cable Landing Station.

Scheduled to launch in 2011 and designed to operate for up to 25 years, the GBI cable system will connect all the countries of the Gulf region with each other and provide onward connectivity to Europe and Asia.

The cable system has a capacity of up to five terabits per second on certain cable sections, allowing the system to meet the rapid growth in demand that has been forecast for traffic originating and terminating in the Gulf.

Other partners of the GBI Cable System include the Iraqi Telecom and Post Company, Vodafone Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s Integrated Telecom Company (ITC).

Following Bharti Airtel’s bid for Zain’s African assets for US$10.7 billion, the Indian operator’s shares closed 9.2 per cent lower yesterday at INR 285. The single day of share trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange since Sunday’s announcement left the company’s investors poorer by INR 110 billion (US$2.38 million). Bharti’s market capitalisation now stands at INR 1.1 trillion.

The view from analysts over Bharti’s intentions to buy telecoms operations in 15 African countries is varied with Merrill Lynch, Macquaire and domestic securities house Emkay saying the proposed acquisition is highly priced. However, Goldman Sachs, UBS and Deutsche Bank perceive the acquisition as being long-term positive for the telco.

In a research note from the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, the foreign broking house reduced the stock’s rating from ‘buy’ to ‘underperform’. It cited three reasons: the deal valuation appeared rich, the growth outlook for Zain’s African portfolio appears unexciting and that a potential deal could materially stress Bharti’s balance sheet.

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Zain sells African assets for US$10.7 billion

The UAE’s Etisalat has announced its customer base has exceeded 100 million subscribers, across 18 markets in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. A breakdown of these numbers by market has not been disclosed.

Etisalat has operations and investments in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Tanzania, Benin, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Niger, Togo, Republic of Central Africa, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Afghanistan, India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It is interesting to note that the firm entered 10 of these markets only in the past five years.

In its domestic market, the operator counted more than 7.74 million mobile lines in the UAE in 2009, an increase of six per cent year-on-year. Fixed line subscribers numbered 1.31 million, while the telco’s Internet customer base rose 16 per cent to reach 1.33 million end-December.

Zain Saudi Arabia and Motorola have signed a contract to deploy the first Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in Saudi Arabia. Deployment will commence in the second quarter enabling Zain to offer high-speed 4G mobile broadband services to its subscribers.

Motorola will provide and end-to-end 4G solution including radio access network (RAN), evolved packet core (EPC), devices and optimisaton, and integration services. A FDD LTE network in the 2.6GHz band will be rolled out, overlaying Zain’s existing 3G network across the country.

"We want to provide Zain subscribers in the kingdom with the fastest high-quality network that can accommodate real-time multimedia applications such as video conferencing, high definition (HD) content streaming, video blogging, or the ability to quickly upload video onto social networking sites,” stated Ismail Fikree, chief operating officer of Zain Saudi Arabia. “With LTE, Zain customers will be able to experience unparalleled mobile broadband experiences.”

With the best performance and lowest cost per bit of any standards-based, cellular technology, LTE is expected to deliver throughput in excess of 100Mbps and 15ms roundtrip latency, to provide subscribers with a unique mobile broadband experience that is comparable or exceeding what they have at home today with fixed broadband connections. In addition, because of LTE’s lower cost per bit, it makes bandwidth-hungry applications more cost-effective for operators to deliver profitable mobile broadband to the mass market.