Avea

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Avea

Type	Private
Founded	2004
Headquarters	Istanbul, Turkey
Industry	Mobile telecommunications
Products	Mobile phone services, mobile phone related goods
Parent	TIM
Website	avea.com.tr

Avea is one of three GSM operators in Turkey. It has been founded in 2004 with the merger of the two GSM operators Aycell (Turk Telekom) and Aria (joint venture of Is Bankasi (51%) and TIM (49%)). TIM and Turk Telekom own 40% stake each and Is Bank Group holds 20%. In September 2006, Telecom Italia announces that, having received authorisation from the relevant Turkish authorities, the sale of 40.5% stake in Avea, held by subsidiary TIM International, to Turk Telekom, for a total of USD 500 million, has been finalised. Therefore, the current shareholder structure is 81% owned by Turk Telekom and remaining 19% by Is Bankasi. Its competitors, Turkcell and Telsim, have both been founded in 1994 and use the GSM 900 frequency range while Avea uses the GSM 1800 range.

[edit] Coverage area

The merging of two GSM operators has resulted in the need of redesigning the network architecture to extend coverage and to solve the issues created by the network load. Avea has been able to complete most of that process about one year after its creation, and currently covers a vast majority of Turkey's land area with more than 7000 base stations (A map can be found on The GSM World Web Page). In contrast to Turkcell and Telsim, Avea doesn't have an extension in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and customers therefore roam on the KKTC Turkcell and KKTC Telsim networks.

Being a merger of two networks, Avea suffers from the heteregeneity of roaming partners and customers with numbers beginning with 50 and 55 don't have the same list of roaming partners (see the list of roaming partners for 505 customers and the list of roaming partners for 555 customers for the different partners' lists). Avea also offers GPRS / EDGE / 3G roaming in multiple countries (see the list of GPRS roaming partners for 505 customers and the list of GPRS roaming partners for 555 customers).

[edit] Competitiveness

As the latest participant in the Turkish GSM sector, Aria, Aycell and Avea have been obliged to offer lower prices to attract a maximal number of customers. Consequently, Turkcell (the leader of the Turkish GSM market) has lowered down its intra-network call rates by a third after the creation of Aria, and halved all call rates when Avea has been launched.

Currently, customers pay between 0 and 0.35 New Turkish Liras per minute for national calls and between 0.32 and 2.1 New Turkish Liras per minute for international calls (for details, see The Avea Tariffs Web site); which roughly corresponds to respectively 0, 0.20, 0.19 and 1.1 euros per minute. The very common SMS service costs between 0 and 0.06 New Turkish Liras per SMS for national SMS messages, and 0.21 New Turkish Liras for international ones (which corresponds to 0, 0.03 and 0.12 euros) (you can see the Avea Service Tariffs Web Site for details).

We can therefore see that the new participants had a positive effect for the users, and that the general call as well as service costs are lower than in most European countries.