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Kabul (pte046/30.06.2003/17:27) - Afghanistan's second commercial GSM network, known as "Roshan", is poised to go into operation.
Masoom Stanekzai, communications minister of the impoverished country, carried out the first official call on the network during its test phase.
The existing network, operated by Afghan Wireless (AWCC) http://www.afghanwireless.com since 6 April 2002, is already being used to capacity, even though the cost of the service is astronomical for Afghan citizens.
Ericsson has also been operating a network in Afghanistan, but it is used exclusively for the coordination of aid in the capital. It is linked to Sweden via satellite and has a Swedish prefix.
Roshan is a brand of the Afghanistan Telecom Development Company (TDCA) and means "light" in both Dari and Phastu, the two official languages of the country.
The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) http://www.akdn.org/agency/akfed.html owns 51 per cent of TDCA. The rest belongs to Monaco Telecom International (MTI) http://www.monaco-telecom.mc (35 per cent), US group MCT (9 per cent) and French telecoms supplier Alcatel (5 per cent).
Initially, Roshan will cover the cities of Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif. Other towns are to be added in the following four to five years. Investments of up to 120 million dollars are planned for the first ten years of operation.
AKFED has worked with Alcatel in South Asia and with MCT in Central Asia. MIT has already had experience building GSM networks in the Balkans. The consortium received its GSM license in October 2002.
Mobile telecommunications are the most reliable option in Afghanistan, where there are very few landlines.
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