Zain eyes Omantel stake with conditions

There were more rumblings on Tuesday that Zain is one of the eight short-listed operators eyeing a 25% stake in Omantel, although any offer it makes will be subject to certain conditions, according to local media.

"We will look into any opportunity but we must have supervision over the management and we only want to enter the part related to the mobile licence," said Ibrahim Adel, chief communications officer at Zain, in a report by the al-Rai newspaper via Arabian Business.

The Kuwaiti operator also said that it will rebrand Omantel to Zain if it buys the stake; however, a request for confirmation from the telco has yet to be returned.

Oman's ministry of finance last week announced that eight operators from Europe, Asia and the Middle East have been pre-qualified to bid for the 25% stake in Omantel.

Among them are Saudi Telecom, Etisalat and Qtel.

Of course, Total Telecom will keep you up to date with the latest developments.

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Beware of the Internet squelcher

The FCC Wednesday gave Comcast 30 days to disclose details on how it interfered with peer-to-peer applications running on its network, and ordered it to submit proposals for how it intends to stop discriminating against certain types of network traffic.

Of particular note, however, is the language the watchdog employed in this case to describe the unjust actions of the cable company.

The FCC ruled that Comcast's behaviour wrongfully "squelches" the benefits of having an open Internet. Sounds painful.

Official regulatory documents don't tend to spare the syllables, so needless to say it was a nice surprise to read about a watchdog that doesn't stand for unfair squelching.

For Comcast's response to the squelchy accusations, head to Total Telecom.

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Turkish iPhone race

Turkey's largest mobile operator Turkcell plans to launch the 3G version of the iPhone later this year, although it has not yet revealed exactly when the handset will be available.

With Vodafone having committed back in June to bringing the Apple device to market in the second half of 2008, the race is now on to be the first to actually launch the phone.

Turkcell said it will provide further details at a later date, including prices and tariff packages.

Turkcell is the country's leading mobile player with 35.4 million customers as of 30 June and, according the country's regulator, a market share of 56% at the end of Q1. Despite its commanding lead, Turkcell is under threat from Vodafone, which has launched an aggressive assault on the market. Voda entered Turkey in May 2006 through the acquisition of Telsim, rebranding the operator last year.

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Moto's European handset CEO to leave

Motorola's European handset chief Vik Patel has become the latest in a string of executives to leave the troubled vendor, according to a report by Marketing Week.

His departure could be a setback for Sanjay Jha, the newly-appointed CEO of the struggling devices division, who was recruited from chipmaker Qualcomm earlier in August.

In an unusual move, Jha was also appointed to co-CEO of the whole company, alongside Greg Brown, who has led Motorola since last November.

Unfortunately the report doesn't cite any sources, and a call to Motorola seeking confirmation was not immediately returned.

If indeed Patel has left, he'll be just one of a whole host of Moto execs to leave the company in 2008.

So far this year the vendor's finance chief Tom Meredith, marketing chief Kenneth 'Casey' Keller, and one-time handset CEO Stu Reed have all left the company.

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Fibre update

Many apologies for the lack of posts on the blog in recent weeks. Whoever said August was a quiet month in the telecoms space was clearly on crack.

I've just received a number of pictures of the Geo sewer fibre network we toured last month (see Knee-deep in fibre post for more on that one), so here are a couple just to give you a flavour (hmmm, perhaps a poor choice of word under the circumstances!) of what it was like down there. At this stage we have no pictures of the Total Telecom team wearing our safety equipment, which is a shame, 'cos we looked hot!

Incidentally, last week Geo announced the revamp of its metro networks portfolio, unveiling new scalable 1-Gbps and 10-Gbps managed network solutions, delivered via London’s sewers. View the announcement here, on Geo's website, and why not also check out the company's video presentation detailing its sewer network rollout. Had I seen this before Geo invited us to view the network, maybe I would have had second thoughts about accepting!

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