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Jan 3 05

Telenor's mobile arm in Hungary, Pannon GSM (Pannon), has acquired one of the UMTS licences in Hungary, a "C" licence, for HUF 19 billion, equivalent to NOK 630 mill.

The licence fee is payable with 5.5 billion HUF in 2004, and the remaining in three yearly installments. "We expect much of the 3G-technology providing wireless broadband," said Pannon's CEO, Ove Fredheim, in a comment to the award.

 "It was very beneficial for us to get the "C" license with 1800-frequencies because it will improve the utilization of our existing GSM network and thereby reduce CAPEX," said Mr. Fredheim.

The licence acquired by the company has neither content nor coverage requirements. Pannon GSM will build the network and launch services according to demands and customer-needs. The licence awarded, which is a "C" licence, contains two 15 MHz FDD[1] and one 5 MHz TDD[2] UMTS frequencies and 74 channels in the GSM 1800 frequency band.

The Telenor group has already launched 3G in Norway. UMTS stands for one of the possible technology system the 3G services: Universal Mobile Telecommunications System. UMTS network are currently existing in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, United Arab Emirates, France, Finland, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxemburg, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain United Kingdom, New Zealand and Japan. Due to UMTS technology communication will be faster with more than 5 times, so we can enjoy videoclips, films, good quality internet speed and high speed other data download.

The transfer speed of UMTS is 2 Mbit/s, while GPRS is providing the maximum of 115,5 Kbit/s.

 [1] FDD: frequency division duplex frequency block [2] TDD: time division duplex frequency block