Azerbaijan, Baku, Sept.7. / Trend H.Valiyev /
The Azerbaijani Communications Ministry has defined and submitted to the government for consideration the additional terms required for issuance licenses for 3G services, head of the Management Department of the Azerbaijani Communications and Information Technologies, Aliyar Tamirov, told Trend on Sept.7.
The terms developed by the ministry will be made public soon, Tamirov added.
On Aug.7 Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on the services requiring a special license, which includes issuing licenses for the provision of 3G services. According to the decree, the Cabinet of Ministers is in charge of determining the additional conditions required for issuing licenses within a month. The government has set the cost of license at 11,000 manat.
The document, adopted by the government for the fist time, is the basis for allocating radio frequencies, licensing the use of radio frequency resource, providing permits for the operation of radio-electronic machinery and determining the limits of their use in the republic's territory.
At present, the ministry is considering issuing a development bill regulating the provision of 3G communication services to subscribers. If the country applies the bill in the 3G service sector, then the resolution of technical issues on installing the necessary equipment in the subscriber's service centers will not require much time. As a result, 3G services can be fully implemented in the shortest period, the ministry said.
Frequency regulation is one of the most difficult points in competing for a 3G license. In order to hold the competition it is necessary to define the conditions for the use of radio frequency bands identified by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) at a range of 2 GHz.
Today the operators consider LTE and UMTS technologies to introduce 3G.
National operators have confirmed their readiness to deploy next generation networks in 2006. However, it depends on when the government allocates the necessary radio frequency resources and issues the licenses. All three (Bakcell, Azercell, and Azerfon) operators have successfully tested the possibility of 3G technology at the inner corporate level and all of them plan to get a license.
The current limited resources of the existing networks cannot meet the customers' needs in the new services. From this point of view, market participants consider the transition to 3G technology significant, providing high-speed data and multimedia, creating the conditions for forming a new generation information and communication services market.
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