14 - 20 December 2000

go mobile, Comfone sign roaming agreement

by Franco Aloisio

go mobile has signed an agreement with Comfone Ltd which will give subscribers international roaming access to over 100 operators in 80 countries. The agreement was signed between Betina Balitzki, area sales manager for Comfone Ltd, and Prof. Juanito Camilleri, chief executive officer of go mobile.
Comfone Ltd, a subsidiary of Swisscom, offers mobile phone operators various services related to roaming access, whereby subscribers can still receive and make calls via their mobile phone despite being in foreign territories.
Comfone acts as a broker on behalf of its clients, and strikes various roaming access agreements with several operators around the world. In go mobile’s case, Comfone will now set up roaming partnerships with over 100 mobile phone operators worldwide. Prof. Camilleri told The Malta Business Weekly that Comfone is an excellent international roaming platform for go mobile, as it facilitates the various aspects related to the logistics of linking one’s own mobile phone services in other countries.
“We have already some roaming access agreements in place, such as that with the UK. These were arrived at on a bilateral level. However, the fact that Comfone strikes several agreements on your behalf is of great importance for us,” Prof. Camilleri said.
“Still considerable testing will have to take place, by means of the exchange of SIM cards, to make sure that the interconnectivity is in place,” he said.
Vodafone Malta too has an international roaming access agreement with Comfone. Eventually, go mobile informed Comfone that it had plans to come into an agreement with Comfone. However, until a few months ago, the agreement with Vodafone was on an exclusive basis, thus preventing go mobile from striking an agreement with Comfone.
Sources said Vodafone had insisted with Comfone to arrive at an exclusive agreement. Last October, go mobile decided to lodge a complaint at the Office of Fair Competition to rectify the situation and force Vodafone to relax the exclusivity clause in its agreement with Comfone.
The decision to open up the agreement to go mobile was taken a few weeks later.
Meanwhile, Vodafone recently successfully concluded negotiations for another 13 international roaming agreements, bringing the total up to 140 agreements worldwide.