BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

17/11/2008

Beltelecom international monopoly will be revoked by 2011

Belarusian fixed line incumbent telco Beltelecom is to lose its monopoly on interconnecting telecoms services with foreign operators within the next two years, e-belarus.org reports citing a statement from the first Deputy Minister of Communications and Informatisation, Ivan Rak. 'We have to rebalance tariffs which are subsidised by the state, and bring them into correspondence with costs, at least, and this could happen at the end of 2010,' Rak said. The Belarusian parliament adopted revisions to the Law on Telecommunications last month, including matters surrounding interconnection issues, and the amended draft law is currently awaiting presidential approval. Belarus is looking to liberalise its telecoms markets as a precondition of WTO membership. Speaking last month, the country's Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Yevdochenko said: 'The European Commission has given us the green light to hold bilateral and multilateral negotiations on Belarus' entry into the WTO. We are now awaiting signals from the US as to the status of our relations.'

Beltelecom had 3.7 million fixed lines in service at the end of September, including 788,000 connections in rural areas. The telco added 100,600 new lines in the first nine months of this year, compared with the 55,000 new lines commissioned in 9M07. By 1 October 2008 approximately 26,000 lines were using WiLL wireless technology, thanks to a joint project being run with domestic CDMA-operator BelCel.

Source:

http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=26111&email=html

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