TEHRAN - Iran has awarded Germany's Siemens and Sweden's Ericsson contracts to provide the country with 1.2 million new mobile phone lines, telecommunications director Ali Reza Bahrampour said Friday.
Finland's Nokia initially expressed interest in the deal, announced in November, but was dropped after insisting on taking the whole market, Bahrampour said, quoted by the student news agency ISNA.
In contrast, Siemens and Ericsson will share the market, selling the necessary products to expand Iran's mobile phone network.
France's Alcatel also expressed interest in the project but was excluded in order to prevent yet another network being installed in addition to those of Ericsson, Siemens and Nokia, which are already in place.
The Iranian ministry of telecommunications wants to boost the total number of mobile lines to four million by the end of 2004 from about half that figure now.
In 1999, the country had an estimated population of almost 63 million.
Iranians must pay about 900 dollars (euros) to obtain a freely-traded mobile subscription, or go through the ministry and wait more than a year for a price of 4.5 million rials (roughly 560 dollars).
Once obtained, service is patchy - due to an overloaded network - with connections hard to establish and a constant risk of being cut off.
Nonetheless, when the government launched a public subscription for new mobile lines two months ago, 1.3 million people rushed to signed up.
Ministry officials say another hundred of so re-transmitters are needed to provide full coverage in the capital.
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