Kuwait’s Zain has officially asked last week to bid for a 4G license under the government’s terms and conditions, a senior source from the CIT Ministry told Reuters’ Arabic service on Sunday. The ministry appears to also be in talks with China Telecom to explore the possibility of its entry, a ministry source tells Al Masry Al Youm. As we noted yesterday, the CIT Ministry had been actively courting foreign competitors, a move the existing operators tell AMAY is just a negotiating tactic to get them to accept the government’s terms on bidding for 4G. MCIT had said it would consider opening the field to foreign operators any one of the existing MNOs backed out of the 4G sale.

As for the talks themselves, telecom operators are complaining about six items in the 4G agreement terms, sources told Al Mal. In a meeting with the head of the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA), representatives from Vodafone Egypt, Orange Egypt, and Etisalat Misr objected to the limited spectrum on offer, saying it will affect the service quality. The MNOs say the cost of the licence is too high and that will be challenging to pay 50% of license fees in USD. Sources also said the August deadline does not give the companies enough time to reach a decision, overlapping as it does with annual leave season the seating of new board members. A government source told Al Borsa that it will not back down of the charging 50% of the licenses in USD and that the operators have until the end of the first week of August to accept.

State-owned Telecom Egypt plans to fully accept the terms (which MNOs say skew in its favor) and begin preparations to pay the license fee next week.

In other NTRA news, it emerged last night that the regulator is considering new restrictions on the sale of mobile phone lines, a source from the NTRA told Youm7. The source added that the NTRA will redouble its efforts to clamp down on sales of SIM cards outside of licensed vendors as part of know-your-customer rules, a key component of its security policy requiring authorized outlets fully document the personal information of new subscribers. The NTRA had imposed a model contract for new subscribers last November and had clamped down on both retailers and telecoms, enforcing fines on the latter, and conducting a sweeping crackdown on the former. The issue had seemed to have died down since January.