French supermarket chain Carrefour launches its own MVNO in Poland
By Dusan Belic on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 3:00 AM PST In General
French supermarket chain Carrefour is launching its own MVNO telephone service called Carrefour Mova in Poland. This is not their first time, though. Poland is the fifth country in Europe where they are offering their mobile phone service. Other markets include France, Belgium, Spain and Italy.
According to Carrefour Polska’s new chairman Gilles Roudy, Carrefour Mova plans to win around 100,000 clients in the course of a year. Aside from offering equally low-cost phone calls to all other carriers in the country, their key selling point is the possibility of gaining free minutes in exchange for shopping at Carrefour.
Carrefour Mova is relying on Polkomtel’s infrastructure for its services.
[Via: wbj.pl]
I’m in Poland at the moment and have heard this announcement. The problem in Poland is that none of the three (there are four “REAL” operators here) operators allows MVNO’s to go lower than certain point in the per minute charges so while there are about 5 MVNO’s here, they all have almost the same offers.
Now as far as three vs four “Real” operators..one of them is called PLAY Mobile.. It was supposed to be a 3G only operator in Poland which launched with big fanfare…but then don’t have their own infrastructure (towers)..it’s all “under construction” so they ride on one of the “REAL” networks for the time being and their 3G is as spotty as everyone else’s. Also if you go to Play’s website – there’s a certain similarity to British “3″ operator…are they waiting to be bought out by Three ???