Telia discontinues collect call service

Telia discontinues collect call service On September 1, 2004 Telia will discontinue the two services Telia Sverige Direkt (Telia Sweden Direct) and BA-samtal (Collect Call). These services are being discontinued because of low usage, which has resulted in unprofitable operation. Telia will not provide an immediate substitute collect call service. However, customer behaviour is increasingly changing and more and more people are instead using mobile telephony and the Internet to a growing extent today. "Too few customers are using these two services, which has made them unprofitable," says Indra Åsander, head of the Consumer Segment at TeliaSonera Sweden. "We cannot operate unprofitable services on a long- term basis and there is no indication that demand for these services will change in the short or long run. This is because customers are using other types of services, such as mobile telephony and the Internet." Telia Sverige Direkt is a completely automated service that customers can use to call collect to Sweden from abroad. The customer calls a toll- free Telia Sverige Direkt number that is valid for the country they are in. The service functions for collect calls from approximately 50 of 197 countries in the world. BA-samtal is a manual collect call service in which calls are connected through an overseas operator The BA-samtal service has been gradually discontinued and is only available today in around 20 countries. For further information journalists can contact: Indra Åsander, head of the Consumer Segment, TeliaSonera Sweden, phone +46 8 713 58 30. TeliaSonera is the leading communications company in the Nordic region and the Baltic. In December 2003, TeliaSonera had 11,957,000 mobile customers (37,610,000 including part-owned subsidiaries), 8,061,000 fixed customers (9,160,000 including part-owned subsidiaries) and 1,631,000 Internet customers (1,691,000 including part-owned subsidiaries). TeliaSonera is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, the Helsinki Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ. The pro-forma turnover from January to December 2003 was SEK 81.7 billion (EUR 9.01 billion) and there were 26,694 employees. ------------------------------------------------------------ This information was brought to you by Waymaker http://www.waymaker.net The following files are available for download: http://www.waymaker.net/bitonline/2004/06/01/20040601BIT00230/wkr0001.pdf