France's Alcatel is to start work on a $76 million project to rehabilitate Iraq's battered telephone network, an Iraqi telecoms official said Tuesday, September 4. But a Chinese firm has pulled out of a $28 million plan to set up a mobile telephone network in Iraq, the weekly Al-Rafidain quoted the official as saying.
The deal with Alcatel was part of a series of contracts recently approved by the UN sanctions committee, he said. Under the deal, the French telecoms giant will build a new international telephone exchange with a capacity of 1,200 lines and a microwave telephone network linking Baghdad with central and southern provinces.
Alcatel will also link existing telephone exchanges in Baghdad and set up new exchanges with a capacity of 280,000 lines. The source said Alcatel experts were expected in Baghdad to start setting up the exchanges, which should become operational early next year, but did not specify their arrival date.
Iraq's telephone network, which was largely built by Alcatel in the 1980s, suffered heavy damage during the 1991 Gulf War. The Iraqi official also said a Chinese firm had pulled out of a project to set up 25,000 mobile telephone lines in Iraq even though its contract with Baghdad, worth $28 million, had been cleared by the UN sanctions committee.
He said the firm had given no reason for its decision and Baghdad was now searching for another company to introduce mobile phones into the country. — (AFP, Baghdad)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
