Wellington - New Zealand's watchdog Commerce Commission said Wednesday that the country's two main telecommunication companies, Telecom and Vodafone, charged too much for mobile phone calls.

Their rates were "significantly above current international cost- based benchmarks," chairwoman Paula Rebstock said.

She said reduced price offers by the companies, which are trying to avoid government regulation forcing them to cut charges, were not acceptable.

Norway-based Telenor Group has made the payment of the first installment of Rs 1,250 crore in Unitech Wireless that gave it a stake of 33.5 per cent in the telecom JV.

With this investment, the Norwegian company has made a formal entry into the world’s fastest growing telecom sector.

Speaking on this, Telenor Group President and CEO, Jon Fredrik Baksaas said, “This marks the formal entry of Telenor into the world’s fastest growing mobile market and we are now embarking on an operational phase, and the preparations for the launch of our services.”

BSNL and Micromax have signed up a national deal for sale and distribution of 3G Data Cards to the BSNL subscribers.

The freshly launched BSNL 3G services are presently available in around 11 cities, and BSNL eyes to raise this reach to approx 700 cities by the next 2-3 months.

Reliance Communications (RCom), the part of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, is riding high these days.

The company announced that its total subscriber base has gone up to 69.38 million as it added 3.38 million new customers on both GSM and CDMA networks during the last month (Feb 2009).  

RCom had claimed over 5 million additions for the month of January (2009).

Reliance Communications Limited, a part of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, has finally rolled out its CDMA wireless broadband service in the country under the name 'Reliance Netconnect Broardband Plus'.

With downlink speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps and uplink speeds of up to 1.8 Mbps, Reliance Communications' Netconnect Broadband Plus is offering 30% higher downlink rate in comparison to any other wireless broadband offering.

Reliance Communications, on Thursday, has made announcement about the launching of a new wireless Internet service, called Reliance Netconnect Broadband Plus, which is based on the CDMA technology.

The telecom major claims it to be the fastest internet service in the country till date.

With a downlink speed of up to 3.1 mega bytes per second (Mbps) and a separate uplink speed of up to 1.8 Mbps, the newly launched service offers 30% higher downlink rate as compared to any other wireless broad band offering.