One year from the complete deregulation of the communications market, the new competitors on the telephony market are taking on the roaming-type service segment, currently controlled by two major mobile operators, MobiFon and Orange.
The Romanians who travel abroad and do not want calls made in roaming to overcharge their bills will have the possibility to use the local fixed or mobile phones, based on services paid in Romania.
Adisam Telecom, a communications company largely held by two Romanian businessmen, Dima Samata and Adrian Vlad, was getting ready to release a new brand on the communications market, Globax, and three prepaid and postpaid services for making international calls next week, sales and marketing manager Serban Savu told Ziarul Financiar.
To that end, the company has concluded a partnership with one of the top communications companies in the world, the American telecom MCI, known as Worldcom until a year ago, after eighteen months of negotiations.
Two of the new services are a first time for Romania and will be an alternative to the roaming ones operated by the mobile telephony companies. In other words, if you go abroad on business or as a mere tourist, you will be able to call home from any local fixed or mobile phone (albeit not from your own handset with the roaming feature turned on or not), by dialling a single set of extra numbers. One thing, though: you need to buy a Globax voice card before you leave and memorise or write down its code.
The tariffs for the calls to Romania will start at 15 eurocents a minute, and those for calls to other destinations will start at 20 eurocents a minute. The service will be available in approximately 70 countries.
While using the roaming feature, tariffs depend on the network selected once in a specific country. Every call minute usually costs about one dollar. Some networks operate lower tariffs during weekends or nights, but they hardly go below 40 cents.
None of the two major mobile telephony operators, Connex and Orange cared to comment on this. Sources on the market estimate total roaming revenues to be worth ten million dollars a year.
The third Globax service is nothing new to the Romanian consumers, as a number of companies have launched it after the market deregulation on January 1, 2003. It will allow users to make international calls at lower tariffs than those of RomTelecom, starting from 9.5 eurocents a minute. Adisam has recently completed interconnection with RomTelecom and the service will be available in both prepaid (card) and postpaid (six packages, no subscription fee) versions.
iuliana.susanu@zf.ro