Competition over the Moroccan cellular market has recently been stepped up, with Meditel, the country’s second GSM operator successfully completing a GPRS connection on its network. According to a Pyramid Research report, the state-owned operator Maroc Telecom is one step behind, preparing a tender to upgrade its own network to enable GPRS services. The battle for market share on the GPRS front is still far from over, as the speedy newcomer Meditel faces an aggressive well-established opponent.
The operator to launch the service first is set to gain those techno savvy customers and a cutting edge image. However, Pyramid Research estimates that the service is unlikely to have a drastic impact on subscriber growth as GPRS will most probably be restricted to a few urban areas and will predominantly be marketed to business users.
GPRS (General packet radio service) allows data to be sent and received across a mobile telephone network. It is optimized for wireless Internet and multimedia services, offering data traffic at speeds up to 114 Kbps. One of the main benefits of this new packet-switched technology is that users are always on-line, and may be charged only for the amount of data that is transported. Voice calls can be made simultaneously while a data connection is operating.
Morocco’s GSM market entered a new and competitive era with the launch of Meditel services in April of 2000, bringing with it a considerable fall in cellular fees and new service offerings such as WAP and SMS. GPRS is certainly the latest, although surely not the last, development in this fierce competition over the Arab world’s fastest growing telecom market. — (Albawaba-MEBG)
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
