NEPAL: Cellular phones ring again in Nepal

Ever seen that movie called Golden Child, with Eddie Murphy? When I first went through the article below, I could not shake mental images of that one nose picking guy all doing mobile commercials with one of his fingers planted firmly up his nose during the entire conversation. Hmm, guess it’s time to lay off the sugar.

Kathmandu — Nepal’s royal government on Tuesday allowed resumption of pre-paid cellular phone services that had been shut down since King Gyanendra had seized power earlier this year.

Government-run Nepal Telecom — which enjoys a mobile phone network monopoly in Nepal — said service would resume on Tuesday for subscribers who were using pre-paid services in which they buy a pre-determined amount of talk time.

The 1,48,000 subscribers to the pre-paid services are now required to provide photographs, details about themselves, their residence and finger prints to the government as a condition of resuming their service. [Read the rest]