Nippon Ido Tsushin Corp. (IDO) announced it will stop its analog cellular service based on the NTT standard as of the end of March 1999 and instead will use the 6.5 MHz band for cdmaOne digital service. The company, which currently has 16,000 analog subscribers, had stopped accepting new analog subscribers as of the end of 1997.
Italian GSM operator Omnitel Pronto Italia announced it is offering an option for its customers that allows them to call Canada, Great Britain and the United States at Lit. 500 per minute by routing their calls over the Internet as opposed to using the landline operator. To use the option, customers must dial the number 29 before dialing the country code.
L.M. Ericsson said it is continuing to improve and renew its NMT network offerings, reporting that advances in cell planning and radio base stations now gives a four-fold increase in the capacity for its NMT 450 systems. Ericsson had its best sales performance ever in 1997 for NMT networks, said the company, with demand for NMT 450 networks continuing to grow, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. Meanwhile, according to The Strategis Group research, most NMT 450 systems in Western Europe are losing customers rapidly, some at a rate of more than 50 percent a year.
Ericsson also said it has become the first vendor to deliver a solution that combines GSM and NMT mobile networks. It is delivering such a solution to operator Multiregional Transit Telecom in Russia. The new solution also is capable of allowing operators to combine services on GSM and TACS networks.
Swedish company Technor International Inc. announced its subsidiary CellPoint Systems A.B. has entered into an agreement with France Telecom Mobiles under which the GSM network operator will test and evaluate CellPoint’s GSM positioning technology. France is the first country outside of Sweden and South Africa to work with the technology, according to Technor.
Frost & Sullivan in September released new research reporting GSM now is being provided to more than 55 million subscribers in 107 countries. Analysts at the company forecast GSM to capture more than 50 percent of the global cellular subscriber base by 2002.
