Azerbaijan, Baku / Trend corr S. Babayeva / Azerbaijan Communications & IT Ministry will issue licenses for network services of the third generation (3G), Azerbaijani Communications & IT Minister, Ali Abbasov, said at the opening ceremony of a new building of School 270 in Baku's Surakhany district on 15 September.
According to him, the frequencies for 3G have been already allocated and there are technical opportunities to present them to the three Azerbaijani mobile network operators. But Abbasov found it difficult to speak on the exact term of issue of the licenses.
Azercell Telecom JV which has over 2.5mln of subscribers got interest in providing 3G services at the end of 2005 and a respectively young operator in Azerbaijan's mobile network market - Azerfon JV (over 100,000 of subscribers) showed its interest at the beginning of 2007.
3G standard was projected and designed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and its name is IMT-2000 (International Mobile Telecommunications 2000). 3G is a set of services which unite high-speed mobile network with Internet and radio. It enables video-telephone communication, watching films and TV programs on mobile phone, etc.
There are 2 types of 3G standards worldwide: UMTS (or W-CDMA) and CDMA2000. UMTS is mainly spread in Europe, CDMA2000 - in Asia and the United States. According to Wireless Intelligence, at the end of November 2006, there were 364mln 3G subscribers in the world, including 93.5mln connected to UMTS network and 271.1mln to СDMA2000.