Nokia Customising Phones to use Geez text

Cellular-News, Aug 20, 2008

“Ethiopian Semitic (also known as Ethiopian, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic) is a
language group which together with Old South Arabian forms the Western
branch of the South Semitic languages. Today, the name Ethiopian Semitic
languages can be considered a misnomer as the North languages are also found
in Eritrea with two of them being exclusively used there; however, the term
came into use before Eritrea had separated from Ethiopia.” Nokia
Customising Phones for the Ethiopian Market

Nokia is customising a range of handsets, including some 3G models for the
Ethiopian market by adding Ethiopic text capabilities to their phones.
BravoCom, the local distributor for Nokia has ordered the handsets following
a surge in sales of PrePay SIMS by the monopoly phone operator, Ethiopia
Telecommunication Corporation (ETC).

   There has also been a sudden surge in demand which has caught the handset
distributors off-guard and lead to handset price rises in the retail outlets
due to the shortage of phone stocks.

Levi Girma Wake, General Manager and majority share holder of BravoCom told
the *Capital Ethiopia* that the company took advantage of a duty-free zone
in neighbouring Djibouti to ship handsets for sale throughout the Horn of
Africa countries. “What we have done is to hold the products primarily in
Djibouti. And as demand comes from Ethiopia, we ship to Ethiopia or
supplement any other country,” Levi explained.

Levi used to be Nokia’s East Africa Account Manager.

Ethiopian Semitic (also known as Ethiopian, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic) is a
language group which together with Old South Arabian forms the Western
branch of the South Semitic languages. Today, the name Ethiopian Semitic
languages can be considered a misnomer as the North languages are also found
in Eritrea with two of them being exclusively used there; however, the term
came into use before Eritrea had separated from Ethiopia.

ZTE recently added 1.2 million GSM lines to the network capacity to cope
with demand and also a surge in usage which occurred during the recent
celebration of the Ethiopian millennium. A WCDMA overlay is also planed for
some parts of the network. There were several serious network failures
during the upgrade work, with the mobile operator blaming ZTE for not
refarming radio spectrum correctly during the commission of new base
stations.

The state owned monopoly ended Q1 ‘08 with an estimated 1.6 million
subscribers, which according to figures from the *Mobile World* equates to a
population penetration level of just 2%.