The UK arm of Swedish ‘flat-pack’ furniture retailer Ikea is to launch a prepaid MVNO offering on Friday using T-Mobile UK’s mobile network. The offering is available to the 1.4 million members of Ikea’s loyalty scheme in the UK and claims to be 25 percent cheaper than comparable prepaid offers, a senior executive told UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph. Voice calls will be charged at a single rate £0.09 per minute (national calls) and £0.06 for text messages. There is no monthly charge or contract; customers only need to buy £10 of airtime to activate the account. Ikea is the latest in a growing line of UK retailers that have launched MVNO offerings, including Asda (running on Vodafone UK’s network), Tesco (O2 UK) and Carphone Warehouse (Vodafone UK). T-Mobile UK is also the network behind Virgin Mobile, the UK’s largest MVNO, which has 435,000 customers.

In other European MVNO news, Portuguese cable operator Zon Multimedia announced late last week that it has signed a five-year contract with Vodafone Portugal to launch an MVNO. The service is scheduled to launch in the fourth-quarter 2008 and is said to combine mobile broadband and voice services. According to Cellular News, there is currently only one MVNO in Portugal, which was launched last month by Portuguese postal company CTT running on TMN’s network.