Polkomtel delays news of GPRS rollout
Polkomtel failed to release information about the rollout of its General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) as the Business Journal went to press. Earlier in the week, Leszek Kaminski, a Polkomtel spokesman, said the company would issue a statement about the service by Friday.
Kaminski said Polkomtel, which operates the Plus GSM mobile-phone service, still had to consider some "secondary issues" related to GPRS, a technology that enables high-speed data and internet transmission over wireless networks.
"Our aim is to have (GPRS) commercially available for all customers," he said, but added that the company was still mulling issues such as the name of the new service and how many kilobytes per second each packet of GPRS service would contain. Kaminski also said some technical issues remained, and that Polkomtel was testing the GPRS platform and service. "We meant to have it as precise as possible," he said.
Polkomtel's two competitors, Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa and Centertel, announced their GPRS rollouts three weeks ago.
Polkomtel will introduce the GPRS service at a telecom conference in early September in Bydgoszcz, Kaminski said, where the company's offering "would be shown publicly for the first time."
Despite the delay in its GPRS announcement, Polkomtel made headway in the three-way mobile operator race for profit. The company said last Tuesday that it realized a net profit of zl. 111.7 million ($26 million) in the first six months of the year, a 3% increase over the same period in 1999. The company also reported that its client base reached 2.1 million, just 100,000 less than the number of subscribers at Poland's biggest mobile operator and Polkomtel's main rival, Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa, which operates the Era GSM service.
The company also said its sales revenue increased 37% to zl. 1.65 billion ($384 million) from the same period last year, while its EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, rose 70% to zl. 327.7 million ($76 million).
