Around ten unnamed companies have expressed an interest in launching as an MVNO in Turkey, the local regulator said last week. In an interview with Reuters, Turkey’s Telecommunications Board Chairman Tayfun Acarer said it was likely to award licenses before November. “We have prepared a draft outlining the conditions regarding the award of MVNO licences, and we offered it to the sector for review,” said Acarer. He added that the country was also on track to introduce number portability on November 9, a policy that is expected to increase churn among Turkey’s mobile operators, most notably market-leader Turkcell.

In other MVNO news, Japan’s NTT Communications and broadband IP service provider eAccess have joined forces to launch a mobile broadband-focused MVNO called ‘OCN High-speed Mobile EM.’ The service is based on HSDPA technology and claims to offer maximum downlink speeds of 7.2Mb/s and maximum uplink speeds of 384kb/s on a flat-rate connection fee. NTT DoCoMo is the host network for another new Japanese MVNO announced recently, Japan Communications.