Etisalat launches new low-cost brand

Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has soft-launched a new affordable mobile service aimed at low-income and migrant workers. The operator’s ‘Five Sunrise’ SIM card offers flat-rate calling within the UAE and cheaper international calls to many Asian countries, with calls to India priced at AED0.004 (USD0.001) per second as opposed to the AED0.05 charged on a standard Etisalat tariff. Mobile data use, meanwhile, costs AED0.20 per 1MB on a Five Sunrise SIM compared to AED20 per 1MB with Etisalat, Gulf News reports. The new offering runs on the Etisalat network and is sold via its own retail outlets, but the branding is entirely separate from that of the parent operator, with the telco looking to create an entirely new brand for the lower end of the UAE wireless market. Etisalat claimed 56.6% of all mobile subscriptions in the UAE at the end of June 2014, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, with Du accounting for the remainder.