Cosmote Romania
 | |
| Type | subsidiary of Cosmote |
|---|---|
| Industry | Mobile telecommunications |
| Founded | 2000 as Cosmorom |
| Headquarters | Bucharest, Romania |
| Key people | Stefanos Theocharopoulos, CEO |
| Website | www.cosmote.ro |
Cosmote România is a Romanian mobile phone operator. It is the third largest mobile phone operator in the country, following Orange Romania and Vodafone Romania after surpassing Zapp Mobile. It has 6.6 millions subscribers as of March 2011.[1]
It started operations under the brand name Cosmorom, but was re-branded as Cosmote România in 6 December 2005, after the takeover by the Greek Cosmote in August 2005.
Cosmorom was the mobile arm of Romanian national incumbent operator Romtelecom and had never reported any profit. It has been estimated that the initial investment and subsequent loss that was covered by the mother company reached over a billion dollars. Having less than 1% market share and making nothing but losses, there were talks about closing it down, but the final decision was delayed several times and Cosmorom's future was uncertain due to disagreement between OTE (the Greek telecoms ex-monopoly that also owns the majority stake in Romtelecom) and the Romanian government.
Nevertheless, OTE's mobile arm Cosmote (which also owns mobile operators in the Republic of Macedonia and Albania) agreed to buy the majority (70%) of shares from Romtelecom and relaunch the troubled Romanian operator under its management.
Cosmote officials believed that there was room for Cosmote România in the market of Romania where mobile penetration was growing fast, so they prepared for an aggressive come back at the end of 2005, with the aim of extending its poor network coverage to match rival operators and providing affordable services to gain customers.
The process of relaunching, started at the beginning of December 2005 with a wide advertising campaign, aggressive commercial offers to attract customers, a flat tariff pricing policy and some totally new services (like "missed call notification" and "notify me" services[citation needed]) both for prepaid and postpaid customers. A strong accent was given to the prepaid market, including a very aggressive campaign offering a limited number of cards with 2000 free minutes within the network per month.
After acquiring Zapp Mobile Cosmote Romania has launched 3G services and mobile broadband Internet that can be purchased in 11 cities and are available in 300 localities. Subscriptions for data transfer speeds are up to 21.6 Mbit/s.
Radio Frequency Summary
The following is a list of known frequencies which Cosmote employs in Romania:
| MCC | MNC | Frequency | Protocol (Downlink/Uplink speed) | Class | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 226 | 03 | 900 MHz | GSM/GPRS/EDGE | 2G | |
| 226 | 03 | 1800 MHz | GSM/GPRS/EDGE | 2G | |
| 226 | 03 | 1800 MHz | LTE (2x2 MIMO 75 Mbit/s/37.5 Mbit/s) | 4G | |
| 226 | 06 | 2100 MHz | UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (43.2 Mbit/s/5.76 Mbit/s) | 3G | Branded as Cosmote for data/voice and Zapp for data only |
References
External links
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