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The ICE seeks new purchases of 200,000 GSM cell lines

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If you do not find a place in the waiting list to obtain a line of GSM cellular phone, you may have another chance on the rest of the year.

The Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE) will try to acquire in the second half of the 2008 another 200,000 lines of GSM cellular telephony.

This was confirmed by the executive president of the Institute, Pedro Pablo Quirós on last Friday.

The objective of the purchase is to meet the demand arising after the depletion of the 300,000 lines that began to be traded on December 17th.

In addition to these connections, the ICE intends to initiate the sale of 1.5 million cellular lines of third generation (3G) in January 2009.

The 3G telephony is a technology that increases the speed of transmission through the aircraft and allowed at the same time, send and receive files with speed voice, data and images.

However, so far, they didn’t know any other acquisitions that opened the possibility of obtaining lines in 2008.

We will have a little bit more that 300,000 lines. Plus an additional of 200,000, lines, time before the 3G enters. The new acquisition will cost $ 50 millions, said Quirós.

The ICE is still studying the mechanism to see how to acquire the lines and where to buy them.

According to Quirós, it is a negotiation process which is difficult but it will be defined during the month of January.

We have contracts that give us the ability to expand beyond what we have today, "said the president of ICE, without detailing the mechanism that would be used to close the deal cited.

In addition, he anticipated that the ICE tries to put into operation a "platform for prepaying services of the 600,000 lines", but he did not specify the term of the project.

The "prepaid" is that the user can purchase cards for a specified amount of calls until that amount is exhausted.

To sell them, the ICE chose to create a waiting list of buyers and an enable for the activation of connections in blocks of 10,000 users since December.

This purchase is an extension of a lot of 600.000 finished in the 2006.