 في جديدة المدينة بشكل متفكيري في الأفناء لا يجدون هذه الأمن وقد نذهب بها في الأمر بشكل كبير كما كنت أعتقد أن في ألعاب التغريب المساعدة وقد أننا لم يجدون هذا المعلوم بعض الأشياء التي تأتي بشكل مستقبل للتغاية لأنهم ربوا يحتوي على إمكاناء تدخل يجب على أن يأتي أولاً في المنطقة على الأمام فالي is are affectionately known as cows sells on wheels C O W yes OK That's why that's why they're known as known as that so what we've done with our license we could we could have claimed over 100 million reels in performance bonds but that still wouldn't have brought service the customers so what is we put forward the coverage by a few months ومن المشاركات الذين يصبحون المشاركاتين في the IPO لذلك يجب أن يكون المشاركات المشاركة في الجلائي ويوجد مجموعة أكثر من 30 مليون رياض وكذلك من 100 مليون 30 مليون من 110 مليون وكذلك من المشاركات المشاركة في الجلائي ومن المشاركة الجلائي أعتقد أن I'm right because I know she correct me if what I said was incorrect so that's something I think that consumers have something to look forward to competition happening during the summer time here in Johan I would continue in the same view Vodafone said that there's some problems to achieve the procurement of the license and the timetable fixed by ICT you approve that it is really real there's problems to have the places or the companies to fix the BTS and you amend the timetable there is three interpretations of this thing no ICT firstly maybe the market Qatar market is not ready to introduce a second operator and to made a second network because there is some mechanism of rules which are not fixed until now the second option is that maybe ICT have not rightly or good knowledge of the market and have made a mistake making the timetable because any operator can't be a type even Vodafone or another one the third option is that Vodafone did not work hardly to accommodate with this situation and the problem of delay is in fact is of them I will take the second one first the date of the first march is the date which they included in their bid so in other words we were holding them to what the promise they made on the technical side of their bid it was a certain number of months after a license award so it didn't matter which operator got the license we would have held any operator so that's where the date so therefore the estimation came from them the second thing is that the license obligation sits on the operator, not on the regulator so therefore having entered into this commitment the obligation lay on Vodafone to deliver this in other words to provide the resources the third point I would make is that there is a market here that we are absolutely convinced because this I think I said this to you before this is actually quite a dynamic market both in terms of population, population growth and also in terms of market segments because it has many many segments we can go through the Qatari the non-Qatari other Arab countries you have the European or western expats you have the South Asians where you're the Filipinos and then you have the other people so there is a lot of market segments here which could be attacked by a second player and we firmly believe that there is a great market here for a second operator and that is still our view however the problems which Vodafone have faced and I don't want to comment on them because obviously we would be part of a lot of information that would have supplied supplied as with but in general some of them are to do with local rules in terms of planning permission some of them is to do with the fact that they have entered agreements with QTEL and these things have not moved as fast as they had expected that's what Vodafone had expected there's nothing unusual about this it has happened before in other countries they're not that far away from the commercial launch and we believe that you will see the commercial launch in a matter of months 2 to 3 months because basically the first of July is about 2.5 months away yeah so I think within the next 2 that's why I said 2 to 3 months I think you will see the commercial launch of the voice and SMS service and there is a commitment there is a performance bond we've put against that it's not a huge delay but it is a delay nonetheless and we were disappointed with it and we do believe and we firmly believe that the market is is ready for competition but when Vodafone said that there is problems to have seats sites locations ICT Qatar had no room to play to help them perhaps we have talked to the planning authorities but the actual allocation availability of government lands doesn't lie with us we don't have lands available to us or the disposal lands there are other authorities within the state and we have spoken to those authorities and we understand so to Vodafone and they're making progress with the number of government authorities because in Qatar an amazingly high proportion of the land actually belongs to the government which in many other countries would not be the case in other countries a lot more land is in private hands it's just a feature of Qatar and the Qatari market there was an underestimation on their part on the availability of lands but the obligation to get those lands lies on the the operation not on ICT Qatar I mean we felt that we had done enough now we are going to talk to the urban planning people and we have had some meetings with the urban planning people to see what the issues are to see can we help them along the way but we don't see the responsibility for this is lying on us the license obligations I keep repeating lie on the operation and Vodafone take an alternative to resolve this problem and they they are making temporary temporary stations there are some talks about the quality and the the the technicity of those temporary station have you is ICT knowing what Vodafone has introduced in well there were some issues raised about noise because they have to have generators they have to submit each material they introduce they don't have to they don't have to they have their license generally commits into a tower whatever but obviously okay the second point was about the noise we did write them about this and we also spoke to the manufacturer and they are putting sound and any material on that one point I'd make about mobile telephony and it's a point I hope you understand it mobile telephony didn't become dangerous because Vodafone came to Qatar it's either first of all it's a safe technology ICT Qatar would not have licensed a non-safe technology but we probably need to have here and in fact there are standards and these are the standards which we'll be asking them is some form of public reassurance not only for Vodafone but for QTEL because it's never been here for QTEL before we came along to show that the towers here are all within international safety standards and we know they are because they're made the towers the equipment are made by reputable manufacturers there are international standards recognized by the World Health Organization the International Commission and ANI saying Radiation Detection come on you know this for short because it's such a metaphor and all of the towers here are within those standards what we will do is we will carry out tests as regular enough intervals maybe once a year maybe twice a year and we will publish this data and this has been done already by QTEL with the university they have done this a couple times with Qatar University and there's no reason at all you're talking about exactly the same equipment and that's being used by Vodafone exactly the same type exactly the same output because I am asking this question because there are some things and that those equipment are an old equipment an old technology no it's not no it's not it's not it's the same it's the same equipment and the same technology in fact QTEL have a lot of very similar equipment alright there is no difference okay let's move to the interconnection really want to be poor between the two operators we know that the process for ICT to make a decision on the fees on the interconnection fees takes three months over the three months and you have made a benchmark studies concerning the population but there is an element who's missing as a structure of a chaos calculating chaos and QTEL you said it in the statement you have published in the website why QTEL is so late to make made like this system no first of all I think the thing has happened very quickly I think there's been very few markets anywhere in the world that you would have seen interconnection agreement and that's the size of the agreement within six months of them actually commencing the negotiation this was signed on the 15th March oh several hundred it's as big as a telephone directory if I can go into the holding money interconnection about hold sale rates that what the public sees by way of charges in their bills are retail rates and they're the rates that they paid their operators but operators and it's relatively simply hearing category because initially you won't have two operators but in lots of other countries you can have ten fixed operators four or five mobile operators all sending calls to each other a whole crisscross of activity going on and what they try to do is they try to recover from each other the cost of basically all their networks there is a cost of maintaining an effort so if you're an operator and I'm an operator and one of my customers calls you one of your customers basically for you for your customer to receive that call it must terminate on your network in other words it goes into your network that's why we use the word terminate to end on your network and the normal way that the operators compensate themselves for maintaining the cost of their network and receiving the calls through these termination charges we would in the first instance try and negotiate these in other words they would have sat down maybe after the summer last last year and they would have tried to negotiate now we actually took out of the document an offer that was made by QTEL and the response was made by Vodafone our reason I've delayed the proposal we didn't delay it at all it was never delayed by us no deleted or deleted sorry not delayed the reason why we deleted it sorry if I can explain is that in negotiations if people know that their numbers are going to be revealed publicly later on it might restrict them in negotiating but whoever thought we decided our numbers are in there and our numbers are different you can guess yourself as to what the original numbers looked like there might have been somewhat a part but I'd say no more than that so what happened was that they couldn't resolve some issues we dealt with through interim or time to negotiate these ones they were so far apart was obvious they were never going to reach conclusion you'll see also that they included as well as the mobile the fixed and the SMS there were some other ones about video and those but they were not particularly important for the initiation of the market the really important ones are voice calls and SMS so what we did what we would do any regulator would try to do is try and work out what the costs of these things are what's the genuine cost but whoever doing a costing exercise can take maybe a couple of years to do and in fact we've started a regulatory accounting system with QTEL to determine their costs and we have written to them we've issued them with instructions they have to produce separate accounts we have to look at their historic costs the cost for the efficient supplier because we are not at a point in time and normally that would normally take a minimum of 24 months to accomplish so the usual technique then in the absence of this is to use a technique known as benchmarking and benchmarking means trying to go to similar countries outside of this country maybe within the region because one of the things about the region is that you would assume for example it's a UAE or Saudi that costs would be very similar whereas the United States or Canada or Australia costs might be quite different because for example labor costs could be quite different in those countries so for the MTR we used the GCC countries you would see the countries listed there and we basically took an average we applied some calculation to it for the fixed there wasn't that much information available within GCC so we looked to the next most similar region and we looked at MENA to the region your own region for the SMS what we did is we came up with a ratio between the mobile termination rate and the SMS rate so we looked a little bit further afield and we brought in similar countries so we issued these findings to the operators just bear in mind one thing here this was a dispute which has been referred to us by Vodafone about the rates that QTEL were proposing to charge them but in the agreement here this operates which hasn't yet been published we're hoping to get the operators to publish this now if you really want to bore you after that this is not a bedtime book that you always wanted but in this the rates are reciprocal but Vodafone had freedom to set their rates because so in fact they charge each other the same so it's 16 dirhams going one way and 16 dirhams going the other way now these are not prices that the consumer sees these are just interconnection billing so there's revenue made for example by Vodafone and a QTEL person calling a Vodafone person but how it will impact the price policies of the two operators I know that regarding the I was saying the benchmarking we see that you have fixed the lowest interconnection piece in the GC what's your opinion I think that QWIT is no it's not the lowest no it's not the lowest that would be the table of the person Bahrain is my call 19 in Bahrain no no no Bahrain is 7 19 yeah Saudi Oman and UAE are higher than here but QWIT and Bahrain are much lower okay yeah so we are yeah we are lower than most of the GC countries I mean it's not the lower how it will impact or affect the retail we don't think it will have an effect on the retail it's not but in fact it is included in the cost it is included in the cost but it actually by being lower than the other 3 countries it gives them more scope to reduce the price because basically it gives them more margin and therefore the operators have more margin to operate for competition we think it's a fair finding it's a good finding and I am not in a position to obviously discuss with you what QTAP would have been prepared to accept under their own we have actually leapt it out of this but we believe and both sides came back and have accepted it in both directions it is one of the costs which underlies the cost of a call and this this decision and these fees will be for all time or will be renegotiated if they come back and negotiate a lower rate when the rate changes they would have to come back they would have to come back to us what we will do is we will review these rates again when we finish the costing exercise because one of the things is what you want to do is want to work back from the cost of the network down to the cost of an individual call now that is a really complex equation and we have a top level every country economist here is going to work on this so far and it's not something I think that your readers want to know but can I tell you that within the next 2 years we will be looking at the costs again in the light of the actual costs these are just coming up with figures based on a benchmark comparison just one question concerning waterfall waterfall is selling special members style members on its website by fixed price okay they fixed prices taking how many 7s is the number is that correct and is that legal because they are selling numbers and we know that the operators are selling services is that correct okay this one about the numbers first one is one of my first things when I came here 3 years ago is part of the culture here that people want to have numbers desire to have numbers and are willing to pay large amounts first of all just as a basic principle any customer is entitled to get a number it might not be an easy to remember number for free in other words if somebody walks in and says I want a telephone and I want a number for the telephone you are entitled to a number is the balance between having these ETR numbers and people having numbers because there is an issue particularly about the national number stock the population here grew much faster than anyone could have foreseen and one of the things we may have to do in the next few years is actually extend the number range at the moment you have 7 digits we may have to go to 8 or to 9 we are setting up a working group with the operators as to how we are going to handle this ever being a uniform of consultants we are going to assist us with this process because if the population may have flattened out a bit this year but the last 2 years have been staggering at the beginning of last year we would have said there was 800,000 to 900,000 people I think there is something like 1.5 1.6 million it is in that range so that had happened very very quickly so therefore we are addressing this issue about numbers with the easy to remember numbers and the fashion that is here for this but what we want to do is we don't want to stop it all together but what we want to do is we want to as we control the numbers that are put out now we are in discussion with both QTEL and with Vodafone so a couple of things people need to remember though is that if we extend the number range and do by a certain number of 6 and 7 you may get something at the beginning of it but just to take that as an example the second thing that is conditionally put in is that if somebody pays money for a number and for some reason that number changes or that number has to be taken back because the state requirements or regulatory requirements then the operator has to compensate them are the owners basically are the government the state there is no property rights in the numbers so therefore they may have to compensate them back but whoever we we realize that there is a culture here of this QTEL regularly holds auctions and I think holds the world record I did not for that something like 10 million rails yeah it's actually the highest in the Guinness Book of Records so what we would see is we need to going forward have a policy with them sit down we had certain discussions with them earlier this year we reached a certain level of agreement with them that we would have a working party and we would hope to have this work finished by the end of 2010 I thought it would be starting this year we don't think the country will run out of numbers before then but at some stage there will have to be an extension of the number range going forward because if the population is going to go into 3 million those kind of ranges that some people are talking about you definitely need more okay just let me come back to the agreement between the operators after the agreement was some declaration some statements interviews in the press but site sharing is it is this thing about the site sharing is it location sharing sorry okay just a comment when we see differences and the two operators speaking both of the other and the newspapers do you think that is a healthy case and that's is a truth of a healthy competition but when I come from that's normal it's actually normal for operators to have some disagreements and some disputes so therefore it doesn't really distort maybe maybe someone unusual in this environment for example you don't have other areas of this competition like banks you don't have banks it's good so in that sense it's healthy the second thing is there is a site sharing agreement that's actually a copy it's actually a very substantial document in this site sharing agreement they've agreed to share sites in the event of any dispute about any particular site where they had said they would share there was a site sharing agreement they can refer to us for arbitration for dispute that's what we're here as regulator for so far on sites there's been no reference to us on dispute settlement on sharing that there is an issue before us about indoor sites which is the booster radio inside and buildings but there has been nothing about outdoor sites referred to us it could be referred to us but however the best way of them dealing with this is commercial is for them to have a commercial agreement to work the commercial agreement and to get on sites it's one of the most common things around the world because it actually works out to quote operations advantage in other words that I have a tower here I can put my digits on my tower you can put your digits on the other tower there is a price agreed between us and we did that there's various technical standards about knowing interference about the workmen getting access to the sites that's one of the reasons why the document is so big because there has to be a whole set of rules what they even negotiate here is a commercial agreement between us which they were required under the law to file with us so in the event of any dispute then under this filed agreement they may come to us and we can arbitrate so far we haven't had any such reference nobody has referred to none of these disputes have been referred to us so far do you think that there's signals a healthy competition which will have an impact for the service given to the consumer the prices well the prices well we already know their prices and their prices are published there's a slightly different notification process for the two operations you might as well know this first of all Qtel is a dominant player you can line this up with monopoly or significant market power I must declare it to be dominant last year it was one of the first things we did in the middle of last year the effect of this is that as a dominant player Qtel has to notify us 28 days in advance of any prices coming in 28 days 4 weeks in advance of a new price and they notify us and they have to get our permission to launch any particular price we can ask for changes we don't generally regulate on the basis that we are determining the price but what we look for is consistency consumer welfare transparency all of that kind of thing they also have to inform customers 21 days in advance Qtel increase then to go on to Vodafone Vodafone have a slightly different standard they have to notify us on the day they launch on or before the day they launch the service and Vodafone also within a 21 day period afterwards we can go back to them and say we don't like this you need to change this but it's a slightly different it's a lighter regime for Vodafone at this point in time we obviously know what Qtel's offerings are at this point in time we don't know what Vodafone's final commercial launch is because they have a couple of months to get this ready and launch it we do know about the trial offer and we do know about the shareholder offer so we're actually aware of both of these how was the opinion on YCT concerning the trial offer I would prefer not to make comments on how good one offer is against the other because basically what we want as a regulator we want the market to decide in other words we want the market to decide which is the better offer and we won't be making any recommendations or any distinctions between the two however one of the things we will be very clear on is that there will be transparency in these offers and we will be requiring them to publish their offers on their website and that kind of thing in some of the more complicated markets there is regulators have put up websites I know we've done this in my own country say that if I want a package which provides for this amount of SMS and this amount of minutes per month which are the best deals but what it does is it shows you and then the consumer goes in on the website and chooses the best deal we would never be saying that phone phones is better than QTEL we feel that this is what we will provide for is for the transparency the way it's advertised the terms and conditions that are done and therefore consumers are making it's been doing a lot of work on this and effectively this is how customers will determine because this is a regulator's ideal which is that the market decides how we can make a Vodafone trial offer they have a mechanism a module to to be one of the first users of the Vodafone numbers you must have a credit card an international credit card for paying by internet is that correct also because there is a lot of people who don't have this is abstract in the right well first of all it was for its trial for example for the second offer concerning the the shareholders the first shareholders there is 20,000 of shareholders until now this number is given you have the number and until now there is 20,000 I think perhaps 20% have a credit card I think what you're talking about is something that they did for administrative as a word that's as we understand it however we were not can I just I'll get to the end very quickly on this we would not accept a scenario however going forward in which the service general public would be on the basis of a credit card or bank account only in the words that people have to be able to pay as you know a lot and a very high percentage of this market somewhere around 70 to 80% is prepaid and the people who pay prepaid they actually win and they buy they have a card and they buy the credit at the corner shop and they are paying reals across the counter we would not accept a scenario that someone was going to launch a service for credit card only our understanding is the reason why they did this for the trial was for pure administrative convenience in other words it was easier for them to do and set this up because for example they didn't have their own distribution mechanism they didn't have their own shops open there was a whole series of reasons which they gave us so I can understand why they chose to go that way when the actual full services launched it should be available as a general service available to the general public paying by whatever means and I don't think you I have no reason to believe that you will see anything different you have mentioned a consultation on curative tariffs for corporate communication services and product in 2008 what was the result of this consultation and what the action is taken by ICT this result yeah we love memory basically we received responses from a number of the corporate people we didn't publish the results of this but we have done work on the corporate tariffs with QTEL what we I think the next stage following this would be to get them to put up on their website the actual corporate tariffs themselves at the moment there isn't really particular transparency on those they have a lot of the details of the consumer tariffs which are up on the website one of the issues with corporate tariffs is this is that corporate tariffs are slightly different to consumer tariffs and the corporates generally have some buying power themselves especially the bigger corporates so there isn't the same need as it were for us to be providing these the same kind of protection to the corporate people here one of the things that came out of the things we found is that there wasn't really a full understanding among the corporate purchases here of what the new scenario meant for them and the power of what we call an arbitrage the real benefit of this won't be seen until their fixed service the process of finalizing their fixed license and that was also one of your questions so on the corporate tariff thing it has made some difference but the impact wouldn't be seen by the public and not only by the corporates the real benefit on this will come from the corporates who have buying power themselves have a choice for these products one of the corporate tariffs we did publish whoever at the time was VSAT and we've gone out to because we feel there's a shortage of VSAT services here particularly important for the oil and gas and what we're doing with that is we went out for consultation on this we received a very healthy about 10 responses including quite a substantial number of companies interested in coming into this market and you'll shortly see a licensing process being launched for VSAT services we're finalizing the license at the moment so that was one of the corporate tariffs which actually went out so we're doing different things which is the fact that we didn't publish a final report doesn't mean we haven't acted on it I don't know because it has been a phase for exclusivity okay when did it will stop to pay it okay because there is there's some very interesting questions you didn't pick these up but down in the soapwak of these questions okay this is a simple formula it's actually set out in the decree law which the Emir signed in 2006 until the date of a competitive service launch they would continue to pay the previous exclusivity fee of 25% that competitive service launch is probably going to be the 1st of July or before the trial the trial is not there's a definition in the licenses this lady drafted it it has to be available a competitive service launch has to be available to all of the public that's the way it's actually stated so the trial was a restricted offer and so too is the thing for the shareholders that's restricted to a restricted user group it will be when the service launch now from that day onward there's 2 fees that have to be paid there's 1 fee of 1% which is for us basically it's a license fee and there's a 12.5% fee known as an industry fee 12.5% okay the first payment of that fee will have to be paid by the 1st of March 2010 because basically it will cover okay it's done on a calendar year but it's to be paid by the 1st of March the following year because they have to do their accounts the 1% fee is based upon their net revenues which is their revenues from their licenses here in Qatar yeah only in Qatar not for all the group less interconnection our old friend interconnection fees because they're out payments and they're the payments they make out or indeed to operators if somebody's making an international call let's say to India and they have to make a payment to reliance or to whatever the operator is in India and then the 12.5% is on net profits which is that figure less allowable expenses in net profit net profit for the operation in Qatar yeah for the operation in Qatar so therefore if they own something in Palatine like this or what in India the revenues from that so if we require a separation of their international and international business not impossible but there's some work involved and it's for them to do let's talk about the fixed line the second fixed line why there is a delay well none of the delays have been here there are two parties involved now in this there is QTEL QTEL Vodafone QTEL Vodafone QTEL Vodafone now we have today actually received some documents from them which I think based on what we see Megan you can safely say we should allow in the next few months to finalize that license yes I can't see any more the delay has been on the other side we're between parties concerned but there should be nothing now that we proceed QTEL Vodafone it's Vodafone and Qatar Foundation yeah will be a partner with QTEL DR okay and Vodafone and Qatar Foundation will own about 50 Qatar DR around 35 and then the remaining 15 will go to government institutions 50 35 is 85 15 is 100 I'm just doing my maths very quickly here 35 just DR remember me