Telecommunications in Moldova - Mobile Telephony

Mobile Telephony

The mobile telephone market of Moldova is divided between two GSM carriers - Orange Moldova and Moldcell, and two CDMA carriers - Unité and Interdnestrcom. Orange Moldova launched its network in October 1998 under the brand of Voxtel and was the first and only carrier at the time. In April 2000 TeliaSonera entered the market with its own network under the brand of Moldcell and thus became the second carrier in the country. Moldtelecom became the third carrier when it launched its own network in March 2007 under the brand of Unité. In December 2007 another carrier named Eventis entered the market but three previous carriers have already saturated it so much that on February 5, 2010 Eventis declared bankruptcy and shut down its network.
After the War of Transnistria in early 90's Transnistrian government denied access of operation for many Moldavian based companies on its territory including telecommunications companies. As such the only major carrier on its territory is Interdnestrcom or IDC who began its operation in 1998.
Unlike Internet market the state of the mobile market in the country is very poor, while coverage is not really an issue all carriers practice archaic methods that carriers in many developed countries have long since abolished, general prices are very high compared to other CIS and even EU countries with no change in this segment in many years in fact in some cases the prices have even increased, mobile Internet access is in no better condition with very high prices and very low monthly caps compared to extremely well developed and cheap wired Internet access.
The first millionth subscription was registered in September 2005 since then the number of subscriptions has more than tripled and now amounts to around 3,715,000 which is a bit more than the estimated population of the country, this means that the penetration level has exceeded 100%.
In October 2008 Moldcell became the first carrier in Moldova to launch a 3G network, currently all carriers provide 3G services throughout the country. In September 2009 Moldova became the first country in the world to launch high-definition voice services (HD voice) for mobile phones, and the first country in Europe to launch 14.4 Mbit/s mobile broadband at a national scale, with over 40% population coverage. As of February 2012 all Moldavian carriers are ready to start providing LTE services and are waiting for the regulatory approval.

Second Generation (2G)

Third Generation (3G)

Mobile Subscriptions and Penetration level. (2011)

• Number of Mobile Subscriptions - 3,715,000 (2011)
• Penetration Level of Mobile Telephony - 104.3% (2011)

Market Structure by Number of Users. (2011)

• Orange Moldova - 57.3%
• Moldcell - 36.6%
• Unité - 6.1%