Our Global Mobile Daily service last week told me that there had been around 50,000 porting requests in Turkey on the first day of MNP being available in the country. The story went on to say "it is thought that up to seven million porting requests could eventually be made by subscribers of the country’s three networks, Turkcell, Vodafone Turkey, and Avea."
Working to create the next iteration of our annual Istanbul Eurasia Com conference and exhibition has led me to watch the Turkish market a little more closely of late than I get the chance to do throughout the rest of the year. I daresay anyone asking about burning issues for Turkish cellco execs would get the same sorts of answers I've been hearing. 3G licensing, MVNOs and MNP are the three hottest topics. With this in mind, as well as making the usual calls, I tried using our Eurasia Com LinkedIn group to get a sense of who is set to gain from these developments. When asking which operator is set to gain most from the implementation of MNP, I've received a pretty mixed bag of responses. One school of thought seems to be that MNP will work well for third-placed Avea, which is owned by incumbent carrier Turk Telekom, the theory being that they will win market share by competing aggressively on price. Others feel that Turkcell, having made more progress with getting ready to launch 3G services, will gain by finding it easier to nab subscribers from rival networks less able to offer attractive services. I won't pretend to know enough to take a view one way or the other.
In other Eurasia Com-related news, I am pleased to announce our partnership with the organisers of Mobile Monday Istanbul. We are proud to be hosting the April 2009 meeting, which will immediately follow the day two conference sessions at Eurasia Com. Also, I gladly accepted the organisers' kind invitation to attend the January meeting and offer an overview of the Informa Telecoms & Media take on mobile social networking.
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