Mobile-phone operators are ready to pay for their licence extensions under newly amended legislation, they announced on Tuesday, April 5. The fees they pay will be set by the Slovak Telecommunications Office. Frequency licences for the two largest mobile-phone operators in Slovakia, Orange and T-Mobile, are due to expire in August.
According to Orange spokesman Peter Tóth, the company welcomes the legislation, seeing it as a norm that brings clearer rules for frequency licence extensions, as the law in its previous form had been quite ambiguous. Orange obtained its GSM licence for the 900 Mhz band in September 1996, when the company operated as Slovtel; and its GSM 1800 MHz licence in 1999, when it traded as Globtel.
A spokesman for T-Mobile’s parent company Slovak Telekom, Andrej Gargulák, said that it respected the new legislation, the TASR newswire reported, adding that the most important thing would be for the Telecommunications Office to decide on the size of the fee in a transparent way and to set it adequately, reflecting the actual situation on the Slovak telecoms market. Slovak Telekom obtained its GSM 900 MHz licence in 1996 and its GSM 1800 MHz licence in 1999, when it traded as Eurotel.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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