December 24 (SeeNews) - Moldovan wireless operator Eventis Mobile has started commercial operations following a $35 million (24.3 million euro) investments, the company said on Monday.
"Eventis covers 40% of the country’s territory now, including the capital Chisinau, and the cities of Balti and Soroca," Eventis Mobile said in a statement.
The company plans to have a 90% coverage of the territory by the end of 2008, it added.
Moldova licensed Eventis Mobile, majority-owned by the Cyprus-based investment group Eventis Telecom, as its third wireless operator in the GSM standard in January. The company won a 15-year licence for which it paid $8.0 million, outbidding Russia's second-largest mobile operator Vimpelcom.
The country of four million people has three mobile operators already. Two of them, Moldcell and Orange, operate in the GSM standard, since 1997 and 2000, respectively. The third one, Unite, offers services in the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard since March this year.
Eventis said it has purchased 260 base stations from NokiaSiemens Networks, as 60 of them have been put into operations.
Eventis Telecom, which was established by two Russian businessmen, Dmitrii Ivanter and Vladimir Androsik, holds assets in telecommunication firms in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan
Ex-Soviet Moldova had 1.670 million mobile subscribers at the end of September, up by 30% from a year earlier. The mobile penetration rate in the country reached an all-time high of 48.64% in the first nine months of this year.
($=0.6941 euro)