The East Timor(Timor-Leste) government has outlined plans to liberalise the telecoms market by the beginning of next year. The Timorese deputy prime minister, José Luís Guterres said that there was a consensus within the Council of Ministers on the matter following the definition of the aim of liberalising telecommunications some time ago .
"Now we need to approve specific laws to regulate the entry of other operators and there are at least two companies that have shown interest: Ireland's Digicel and Indonesia's Telecomcel," he told local news media.
There had been talk of liberalising the market back in 2007, but nothing has been said about the issue since then.
Portugal Telecom, which is the main shareholder in current monopoly telecoms operator, Timor Telecom had been kept appraised of the developments. Portugal Telecom invested US$54 million in improving the telecommunications network last year. The company currently has a monopoly until 2017, although there has been precedent in several Caribbean countries who broke the Cable & Wireless monopoly to introduce competition into their markets.
Timor Telecom is the monopoly operator in the country, and the analysts at the Mobile World reports that the mobile operator ended last year with 355,000 customers - representing a population penetration level of 31%.
East Timor was a Portuguese colony until 1975, when it was annexed by Indonesia. The country gained independence in 1999. Following independence and the destruction of the existing network provided by Telkom Indonesia, Australia's Telstra expanded its cellular telephone signal into East Timor in 2000, and operated services until 2003 when Timor Telecom took over.
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