National telecom operator RomTelecom will launch, in early July, a national billing system that will allow the company "to do most of the things the mobile telephony operators are doing," Dan Pazara, RomTelecom's head of external relations told Ziarul Financiar.
The fixed telephony operator is using these strategy changes to reposition itself in the battle over subscribers, waged between RomTelecom and the GSM operators. Romania currently has 4.5 million fixed telephony lines and 10 million mobile telephony subscribers. As compared to the beginning of 2003, when access to the fixed telephony market was deregulated, the number of fixed telephony lines has grown by a mere 200,000, whereas mobile telephony services saw their number of subscribers surge by almost 5 million.
The new billing system, called Geneva, was bought following an international tender, from U.S.-based company Convergys for some 15-18 million euros, the RomTelecom official said. Pazara would not provide more details about the contract.
The Geneva system will allow the operator to provide more flexible packages, such as favourite numbers or favourite time intervals, in other words - to enforce a commercial strategy similar to that employed by the mobile telephony company and by the new players on the fixed telephony market, Dan Pazara said. RomTelecom will be able to introduce certain rate levels for specific groups of users (such as "Friends" or "Family"), with the calls within these groups set to cost less.
"The subscriber would be given the possibility to choose between five favourite numbers at special rates, a certain country where they tend to call more often, a certain time interval etc.," the RomTelecom official said. The packages are to be defined in the following months, with the first commercial offers to be available in the second half of the
