Monday, July 28, 2003		Feature

Cellphones ring in Baghdad mysteriously
Cynthia Johnston

An Iraqi holds a mobile telephone, connected to a Kuwaiti network, near a portrait of toppled leader Saddam Hussein in the capital Baghdad. A mobile phone roaming service was mysteriously available in Baghdad, bringing cellular service — banned in Saddam Hussein’s secret state — to ordinary persons in the Iraqi capital for the first time.

MOBILE phone roaming services were mysteriously available in Baghdad last week, bringing cellular service — banned under Saddam Hussein — to ordinary people in the Iraqi capital for the first time.

Yet officially, a tender for three mobile phone licences the US-led administration plans to offer across Iraq has yet to take place. A US military spokesman could not immediately say why the lines turned on or what that meant for the tender.

Callers with foreign-registered GSM phones were able to make and receive calls and send text messages to countries as far away as the United States and South Africa. Few Iraqis have suitable phones for now. Foreigners working in Baghdad have widely relied on pricey satellite telephones to stay in touch.

"MTC-Vodafone wishes you a pleasant stay in Kuwait," a text message sent to roamers in Baghdad said.

Other cellphone users reported they had service on a Bahraini network, Batelco, which said it planned to offer services and was testing its network.

"Batelco will start offering mobile services to the public in Iraq later this week or early next week," Regional Operations Manager Rashid al-Snan told Reuters.

He said Batelco, partly owned by the Bahraini government, had asked the U.S.-led administration in Iraq for a licence, and would invest over $50 million to build a new GSM network.

The roaming services switched on and off all day. An MTC- Vodafone service representative reached via a mobile phone using his own company’s network from Baghdad said he was not aware of roaming services being offered there yet.

"That’s great...But they didn’t tell us," he said.

The US-led authority that has been running Iraq since Saddam was overthrown in April invited potential bidders for the mobile licences to express their interest last week.

The mobile licences are one of the most potentially lucrative contracts to be offered in Iraq, where mobile phones were banned to all but senior officials connected to a special network.

Wartime bombing disrupted the existing landline network and only about half of Baghdad’s ordinary telephones work.

The Provisional Authority has said it will issue a request for proposals next week that would be available to the firms that express interest. Proposals would be due 14 days later.

Iraq has not yet decided whether to use US technology or the rival, more widespread European GSM system that is used throughout the rest of the Middle East.

But the issue of what technology will be chosen for the national networks has become increasingly thorny.

A decision to use the global system for mobile communications (GSM) standard, widely used in Europe, would be a blow to US firms hoping to build a wireless network in Iraq based on the CDMA (code division multiple access) standard developed by California-based Qualcomm Inc.

GSM technology would allow Iraqi cellphone users to travel to neighbouring countries without changing phones.

The US Army and development workers now use a network in Baghdad built by WorldCom Inc, a bankrupt U.S. telecom firm that is doing business under the name MCI. (Additional reporting by Abbas Salman and Isa Mubarak)