Tele2 launches GPRS services

  • 2004-07-08
  • From wire reports
VILNIUS - In a move to catch up with the competition, the Swedish-owned Lithuanian telecommunications company Tele2 announced it was launching GPRS-based wireless Internet access and multimedia messaging services - Tele2 Go Live - this month.

The two other prominent telecommunication companies in Lithuania, Omnitel and Bite GSM, started providing GPRS services in 2001.
"We have waited until there was a real demand and customer readiness for these services." said Pranas Kuisys, Tele2's commercial director. "Therefore, we needed to invest much less than our competitors did several years ago, and we believe that these services will become widely used over time."
Believing that GPRS services in Lithuania are now overpriced by 30 percent to 50 percent, Kuisys said he expected that the launch of Tele2 Go Live would force Omnitel and Bite GSM to cut prices.
The company intends to provide mobile Internet and MMS services free of charge until autumn, or even longer, after which it will allow each user to send 2 megabytes of data for free monthly, while charging 5 litas (1.5 euros) for each additional megabyte. This payment plan will be offered both to private and business customers.
The Lithuanian Communications Regulatory Authority has released data showing that the total number of mobile phone subscribers in Lithuania, a country of 3.5 million, reached 2.5 million at the end of the first quarter.
Omnitel had 1.1 million subscribers, Tele2 had 765,203 subscribers and Bite GSM had 616,115 subscribers, according to the data.
Meanwhile, Tele2 estimates that a total of some 200,000 to 250,000 GPRS-enabled phones have been sold in Lithuania, and that mobile phone users sent 259.4 million SMS and 168,850 MMS messages in the first quarter of this year.