Motorola Inc. has said that Baltic States wireless operator Omnitel in Lithuania is the first to commercially deploy its new-generation base station, the Horizon 11 base transceiver station for GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks. The initial deployment of the Horizon II is on Omnitel’s 1800 MHz network in the capital city of Vilnius, with 900 MHz network services to follow in the fourth quarter.
UNITED KINGDOM
Software and solutions company MI International said it launched a new location service in the United Kingdom that allows users to track mobile-phone owners. MI said it will sell the service exclusively through The Carphone Warehouse. The new service, named MapAmobile, locates mobile-phone users through wireless networks and works over Vodafone’s, MmO2’s and Orange’s GSM networks. MI said the service will address privacy concerns through text-messaging alerts, allowing users to opt in to the service.
JAPAN
NTT DoCoMo Inc. said that the mova N505i handset manufactured by NEC Corp. offers a dual-speaker system with surround-sound capability, a screen-splitting feature that will allow users to type a reply while viewing a received message, and a 320,000-pixel camera that works like a scanner for reading and storing URLs, mailing addresses and telephone numbers from printed materials. The handset also includes 64-polyphonic ringing melodies, a 2.4-inch color screen and accepts external memory cards. DoCoMo planned to start selling the handset July 4.
NORWAY
Norway plans to auction two third-generation licenses. The licenses, two of four originally tendered through a beauty content, were handed back to the government from their original owners, Broadband Mobile and Tele2. Interested bidders have until the end of August to submit bids, according to press reports. Telenor and NetCom, majority owned by TeliaSonera, hold the remaining two 3G licenses, which were awarded free by the government.
