The price of UMTS licences are reviewed (La Tribune)

The government has given up. They did not have the choice. In front of changes in the telecommunication industry, the government has had to review the whole UMTS case. UMTS licences are not supposed to pay for tomorrow's pensions any more. The reviewed amount, that Laurent Fabius has revealed on Tuesday October 16th, has nothing to do with what was required (4.95 billion euros per licence). La Tribune has published an article on this sensible reduction of licences tariffs. The article "Le gouvernement révise en forte baisse le prix des licences UMTS" thus presents the new deal.

"The operators will pay an amount of 619 million euros and a variable part of their turnover", the daily writes down. The two operators, SFR and Orange, which have paid the first amount of 619 million euros (one eighth of the total original amount) will thus have nothing to pay before 2004. Contrarily to what was planned before, licence providers will just have to pay in proportion to the income they will receive. This is what Bouygues Telecom was claiming for.

As this problem of licence price has been settled, the second attribution round for the two latest UMTS licences should be started in a couple of weeks. The conclusion of the article gives us an idea of the sheer scale of the review that has been done: initially the UMTS was supposed to yield 15.55 billion dollars by 2016, but at the moment profits are up to 1.24 billion euros, while the rest is still uncertain.