Iraq to launch bidding for mobile licences (29/06/05)

Amman (AFP) – Iraq will launch a bidding process for new mobile phone licenses next month, Iraqi National Communications and Media Commission (ICMC) chief Siyamend Othman said on Tuesday.

Othman made the statement at a press conference held on the sidelines of a three day forum on the development of Iraq which opened here yesterday with the participation of Iraqi ministers and businessmen.

“We will announce the opening of the process of bidding for the new mobile licences for Iraq by holding a conference in London July 21-22” , Othman said at the press conference in the presence of Iraq’s telecommunications Minister Juwan Masum.

Dr Latif J. Radhid,
Minister of Water Resources

Othaman pointed out Egypt’s telecom giant Orascom currently controls Iraq’s central region, while mobile phone operations for the south are managed by Atheer, a branch of the Kuwaiti firm MTC, and the north is in the hands of Asiacell, a consortium of Iraqi and Gulf firms.

The London conference is expected to be attended by representatives of a major mobile phone operators as well as Iraqi government officials and parliamentarians, in an effort to secure transparency for the bidding process, Othman added.

Communication experts predict there will be five million mobile phone users in Iraq within three years, and eight million within ten years.

At the conference, the ICMC chief also indicated that Iraq hopes to bolster its sovereignty by putting the country’s official domain on the Internet within weeks.

“We hope to announce very soon the return of Iraq’s domain name ‘.iq’ back on the Internet” he said. “We are at the final stages of negotiations for the return of ‘.iq’ and we are quite optimistic that we can do so in the coming weeks,” Othman added.

Iraq is negotiating to get its place in cyberpace with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international, non-profit organisation that is responsible for Internet Protocol addresses. Business leaders in Iraq say the ability to create a presence on the Internet with websites ending in ‘.iq’ will be a boost to commerce.

The three-day forum provides a chance for Iraqi officials to meet international business community leaders to discuss their needs for rebuilding Iraq, the forum’s organiser John Glassey said.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Water Minister Abdul-Latif Rashid told the conference that security in the war torn country is the biggest obstacle to development. “Security is a problem, logistics are a problem,” Rashid said, but he insisted that not all of Iraq is plagued by violence, citing the relatively peaceful northern Kurdish region and areas of the south, and urged foreign companies to look at the options available.

“As a word of advice to overcome these problems, many outside consultants and contractors can find partners in Iraq and cooperate with them” Rashid said. “There are many government institutions and state owned companies who have equipment and manpower, and it will be much cheaper to use for implementation by foreign contractors,” he added.

Representatives of over 100 public and private Iraqi companies are participating in the forum which aims to ease the process of Iraq’s economic development and boost commercial relations between the Iraqi companies and the international business community.

The forum comes three weeks ahead of an Iraq donor meeting to be held in Jordan, and follows an international conference that was held last week in Brussels, urging the world community to show more generosity to the battered country.