Monaco Telecom plans for 2010

What can we expect in the New Year.

In the run up to Christmas, Martin Peronnet of Monaco Telecom [1] met the press to talk about New Year telecommunication developments. Of primary interest to many of Monaco's business community are improvements to the quality and reliability of Internet services. Customers' online access failed on several occasions in 2009, most recently for about an hour one afternoon in October. Previous outages occurred in late August, during the week of the Grand Prix, and also last January. Following these problems, Monaco Telecom invested 700,000 euros to make the network more secure, and the work that started in November should be complete in February 2010.

Peronnet commented that other business units are performing particularly well. The company's mobile phone service is growing, and digital television plans are on course. Half the households in the Principality are still using analog, and Monaco Telecom aims to convert everyone to digital by the end of 2011. Currently the company is working with Netgem [2] to provide a new TV box in June 2010 that will allow television audiences to record one program while watching another, and to access video on demand (VOD) and interactive TV.

Fontvieille Jetty

Outside the borders of Monaco, the company has renewed its 3 year contract with Kosovan operator PTK [3] to supply international mobile phone communication. The Principality is also part of the 15,000 km undersea cable network that will link Europe to India from July 2010. The several hundred million euros project should improve capacity and communication between 13 countries and 3 continents. On completion, the fibre optic cable will offer high quality transmission facilities for the Internet, e-commerce and video, voice and data services. Behind the project is a consortium of international telephone operators including Cable & Wireless [4], the majority shareholder of Monaco Telecom. Work started on laying a cable at the end of October from the Fontvieille jetty and is slowly progressing out to sea.