Nawras makes its first 3G call

Oman’s smallest GSM provider Nawras has completed its first successful call over its test 3G mobile network. Nawras was awarded an UMTS licence as part of the second national mobile operator licence that it won in June 2004. The company is planning to activate W-CDMA services in the first quarter of 2006 by offering a trial to a limited number of customers. Swedish vendor Ericsson has been chosen as its main supplier of 3G network equipment. Nawras, a joint venture between Qatar Telecom (Qtel) and Denmark’s TDC, launched commercially on 16 March 2005 and had signed up 174,000 GSM/GPRS users by the end of September. In July it launched a high speed EDGE data platform.