Stalinist North Korea has contracted with the Egyptian company Orascom Telecom to provide mobile phone service in the communist country. North Korea began mobile service in November 2002 but within 18 months banned the service for ordinary citizens and recalled handsets. It is believed the network is still available for government officials.

The deal will give Orascom Telecom a 25-year lease throughout the country, with an exclusivity period of four years.

“Orascom Telecom intends to invest up to 400 million dollars in network infrastructure and license fee over the first three years in order to rapidly deploy a high quality network and offer voice, data and value-added services at accessible prices to the Korean people,” the company said.

North Korea has a population of 23 million. Orascom will cover Pyongyang and most major cities in the first year of operations.

The North Korea deal “is in line with our strategy to penetrate countries with high population and low penetration by providing the first mobile telephony services,” said Naguib Sawiris, chairman and CEO.

The firm “has consistently proved its ability to successfully roll out mobile services into countries where no other operator has.”

Comstar UTS, a Russian land-line operator, announced today that it has started building a mobile broadband network using WiMax technology in Armenia. Comstar will buy base station equipment from Airspan Networks.

“We intend to launch the network this year and, therefore, become the first and the largest wireless broadband Internet operator in Armenia,” Comstar’s president, Sergei Pridantsev, said in a statement.

The WiMax network is scheduled provide commercial service in the second half of this year. A Comstar spokeswoman said the net work will cover 75% of Armenia’s population.

Comstar is part of the Russian conglomerate Sistema. Comstar provides voice, data, Internet, pay-TV and other services.

Analysis from growth consulting company Frost and Sullivan predicts that Africa’s demand for mobile Internet access will increase between 40% and 50% between 2006 and 2009. It is thought that this expansion is due to the continent’s lack of sufficient fixed line structure and the reduced cost of handset and mobile internet service prices.

“The poor state of fixed line infrastructure is creating the potential for the African mobile internet market to boom,” states Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Spiwe Chireka. “Mobile internet has emerged as the solution to the continent’s last mile connectivity problem.”

Mobile Internet is much more cost-effective than fixed line infrastructure. Large areas can be covered with broadcast signals cheaply that allow users to access services on the go. But all the news is not good. The cost of mobile internet-compatible handsets and pricing for services puts the Internet out of reach for most of Africa’s population.

The poor infrastructure of some countries is holding back Internet availability. A lack of reliable electricity and inadequate road networks makes it difficult to access remote areas.

“Mobile internet service providers need to form partnerships with cellular companies as well as technology and infrastructure providers to see how best they can provide cheaper or more affordable handsets that will provide good quality service,” advises Chireka. “They should also form partnerships with governments across Africa and work out investment plans to improve telecommunications infrastructures so that deployment of such services is not limited.”

If you are interested in a virtual brochure, which provides manufacturers, end users, and other industry participants with an overview of the investment analysis and growth opportunities in Africa’s mobile Internet access market, then send an email to Patrick Cairns, Corporate Communications, at patrick.cairns[.]frost.com, with your full name, company name, title, telephone number, fax number, and email address. Upon receipt of the above information, an overview will be sent to you by email.

MobileCrunch reported on Africa’s Sierra Leone in August. See: Former Dark Continent Brightens with Mobile Internet.

Connectivity Scorecard, a system that ranks countries on around 30 indicators that measure how will a country boosts its social and economic prosperity through telecommunications technologies, puts the United States at the head of the list. The system was created by London Business School professor Leonard Waverman to examine how well countries utilize networks, cell phones and computers.

The study was paid for by Nokia Siemens Networks. Professor Ilkka Lakaniemi said this new approach to studying telecommunications puts a country like South Korea in the middle of the list because it isn’t simply based on investment in telecommunications but on usage.

“All the other rankings mainly measure only how much have you invested in ICT (information and communication technologies),” said Professor Ilkka Lakaniemi.

“You have a lot of consumer applications, you have a lot of entertainment applications, a lot of this and that, but they do not really add much to productivity,” Lakaniemi said.

The United States, which has benefited the most from ICT, was rated below 7 out of 10. This is mostly due to a weak usage of broadband networks. All countries surveyed have much room for improvement.

“These results indicate an opportunity for countries to add hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefit by rethinking how they measure and enable connectivity,” the study said.

The following are the rankings of innovation driven economies that are rated by the study on a scale of 1-10:

United States 6.97; Sweden 6.83; Japan 6.80; Australia 5.93; Germany 5.52; France 5.07; South Korea 4.78; Hong Kong 4.46; Italy 3.85; Spain 3.56; Hungary 3.18; Czech Republic 3.11.

The following are indexes for efficiency and resource drive economies, scale 1-10, but not comparable with indexes for innovative-driven economies:

Russia 6.11; Malaysia 5.82; Mexico 4.37; Brazil 4.28; South Africa 4.11; China 3.42; Philippines 2.38; India 1.68; Nigeria 1.01.

T-Mobile USA added 951,000 subscriptions between October and December of 2007. This gives the country’s fourth largest mobile phone company a subscription customer base of 28.7 million. T-Mobile’s sales were up 14.6% over 2006 numbers.

Shareholders of Deutsche Telekom AG, the T-Mobile parent company, were asking for the sale of T-Mobile USA last year. Chief Executive Rene Obermann fended off those demands last June, saying that T-Mobile USA can add 5 million new subscribers by the end of 2007. T-Mobile USA fell short of that goal and only sold 3.6 million subscriptions in all of 2007.

T-Mobile USA’s growth did outdo the 9% growth that Deutsche Telekom posted in the European market. Since November, T-Mobile’s German unit sold 70,000 iPhones. T-Mobile is the exclusive iPhone provider in Germany. Worldwide, Deutsche Telekom has 119.6 million subscribers.

Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi thinks that over 25% of iPhones sold in the United States may have been unlocked. Sales numbers from Apple and AT&T revealed about 1.45 million phones were “missing in action” at the end of 2007.

AT&T is thought to hold 480,000 handsets as inventory, leaving another 1 million phones, or 27%, that Sacconaghi said were unlocked so they could work on non-AT&T networks. Apple has refused to say how many iPhones are unlocked but said the number is significant.

Phone companies that carry the iPhone must share service fees with Apple. So far, Apple has chosen one mobile carrier per country to be the official carrier of that country. When an iPhone is unlocked, Apple loses revenue because unlocked phones use carriers other than the officially sanctioned carrier. Unlocked phones could cost Apple millions. For example, if Apple reaches its goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 but 30% of those are unlocked; Apple would lose $500 million and 37 cents per share.

“Besides the financial implications, we believe the prevalence of unlocked iPhones presents a significant strategic dilemma to Apple,” Sacconaghi wrote.

Apple is currently negotiating with carriers in Asia to make the popular iPhone available to new markets. A few weeks ago Apple failed to find common ground with the world’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. An anonymous source at China Mobile said that Apple was asking to share too much service fee revenue.

The United State’s second largest telecommunications company, Verizon Communications, announced that fourth quarter profits were up 3.9% for October through December of 2007. The perceived economic slowdown in America hasn’t hurt company growth, with the exception of a marginal increase in nonpaying wireless subscribers.

“We have not seen a change in our sales expectation through January,” said Chief Financial Officer Doreen Toben.

Verizon made $1.07 billion, or 37 cents per share in the fourth quarter, compared to $1.03 billion, or 35 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding charges, the latest earnings would have been 62 cents per share. The charges include severance costs related to layoffs. The company cut 4,000 employees in the fourth quarter and expects to cut 5,000 more from the wireline division in 2008. Verizon has been cutting its wireline employees, which ended the year at 161,000.

“We have been rapidly shifting our force to the growing pieces of our business, that is FiOS and our wireless business, so both of those will continue to grow in force,” said Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl.

Verizon’s wireless department continues to play second to AT&T in gaining new customers. Verizon added 2 million subscribers in the quarter for a total of 65.7 million. AT&T’s fourth quarter saw an increase of 4.4 million subscribers for a total of 70.1 million.

Verizon Wireless’s revenues were $9.87 billion, up from $8.68 billion a year ago. Wireless money continues to be an ever increasing share of Verizon’s overall sales. Operating income in the business was $3.0 billion, up from $2.5 billion, as Verizon Wireless managed to increase its operating margin by 1.2% to 26.2%.

In all four quarters of 2007, Verizon earned $5.5 billion, or $1.90 a share, on $95.5 billion in revenue. This is in comparison to a profit of $6.2 billion, or $2.12 a share, of $88.2 billion in revenue the year before.

AdMob, a mobile advertising company, is going to test the saying, “If you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere.” AdMob is opening a new East Coast headquarters in the city that never sleeps which is being called AdMob East. It is hoped that Madison Avenue will look to the company’s mobile phone advertising applications.

“Marketers are increasingly extending their campaigns to mobile and we want to be available to guide them through best practices.” said Tony Nethercutt, AdMob Vice President of Sales. “We are deepening our presence in New York to better support agencies and brands as they ramp their mobile marketing efforts.”

In the last two years, AdMob has served over 15 billion ads, including over 2 billion in December of 2007 alone.

Sales Directors Adam Schneider and Robyn Borok will lead the new AdMob East office, which is located on the 39th Floor of 245 Park Avenue between 46th and 47th Street in New York. Between them, they have over 35 years of TV, radio, print, interactive and mobile advertising experience.

AdMob

Each week MobileCrunchArcade compiles the biggest news from the world of mobile gaming.

This week Glu has offered to buy British mobile game company Superscape for $36 million. If the deal is accepted, Glu will come close to matching the U.S. leader of cell phone games, Electronic Arts. Superscape has about 5% of the U.S. market and sells games on carriers Verizon Wireless and Alltel. The Superscape board has approved the takeover. Superscape was a pioneer in bringing 3-D gaming to cell phones, and is still strong in that area. Its titles include Paintball Challenge and Classic Mini Golf. Let’s hope this deal will help keep us glued to our handset.

Square Enix announced this week that it will launch the first episode of Crystal Guardians on January 28. The game is a defense simulation in which you have to defend your crystal from monsters. The company plans to release 28 episodes. So if you want to keep filthy monsters from getting their grubby hands on your family jewel, give Crystak Guardians a whirl.

EA Mobile announced this week that it will release Asterix: The Official Mobile Game of the Movie in Europe this month. I’m not much of a comic book guy, although I look like the Simpson’s character Comic Book Guy. Asterix is a successful comic series in Europe, where over 325 million copies have been sold. In the game, Asterix and Obelix compete in the Greek Olympic Games to win the hand of Princess Irina for young Gaul, Lovestorix. Players start out on the street of Athens before qualifying for events such as long jump, running, disk, football and the chariot race finale. The game is touted as being a faithful rendition of the Asterix cartoon style. I hope Lovestorix knows what to do with Princess Irina’s hand once he gets it.

Punch Entertainment has a new title, Ego, that the company says is, “The Sims meets Facebook.” Its part social networking and part video game. Players create an avatar that needs to be developed by feeding and training. As avatars bump into each other, they can fight, flirt and communicate with each other; winning points to increase their level, and allowing players to buy new cloths, accessories and body features for the avatar. Players can create a buddies list, and open chat and blog functions for the avatar to visit. The basic version of Ego is free but advanced features will only be available in the downloadable mobile game version. I must admit it sounds like fun to get into arguments with other avatars and slap them around if they disagree. My opinions are clearly the only legitimate opinions anyone should have and anyone that disagrees with me needs to have some sense beat into them.

GSMA announced the 2008 nominations for best mobile game this week. The Nominees are: Call of the Pharaoh (Cellufun), Burnout (EA Mobile), Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? (Fox Entertainment), My Hangman (Glu Mobile), and My Dog 2 (I-play). This is the 13th annual Global Mobile Awards show, so it looks as though mobile games are an important part of the telecommunications industry. But anyone who counted all those calloused thumbs out there knew that.

That is this week’s mobile gaming news roundup. Remember to exercise those thumbs, recharge the battery and never take your eyes off the screen.

Yesterday Nokia issued a prediction that in 2008 its mobile phone shipments will increase by 10% and that the company’s worldwide market share will increase beyond the 40% it claimed in the fourth quarter. But these numbers may be too optimistic.

Analysts at IDC predict annual growth in mobile phone sales will drop below 10% this year, making Nokia’s growth projection look unrealistic. IDC published a report today that says it is unrealistic to expect Nokia sales to grow in double digits.

“We expect growth to be in the single digits throughout 2008, and most likely for years to follow,” they wrote.

In 2007, Nokia sold around $1.11 billion worth of handsets. This is an increase of 12.4% over 2006 sales. Nokia shipped more units in the fourth quarter than the next three vendors combined: Samsung captured 13.9 percent of the market for the quarter (up from 11 percent a year earlier), Motorola 12.2 percent (down from 22 percent) and Sony Ericsson had 9.2 percent.

IDC