A new range of cellphone numbers will soon be offered by the Mobile Telecommunications Company of Iran, abbreviated as MCI, following the approval of the Communications Regulatory Authority.
New pay-as-you-go SIM cards will be offered starting with the prefix 0990 in the coming months, ISNA quoted, MCI's CEO Vahid Sadouqi as saying.
Regarding contract SIM cards, the official said a limited number of phone numbers with prefixes 0911-18 still remain and are available for sale.
"At present, the company has no plans to add new numbers for contract SIMs," he said.
Customers can purchase SIM cards via TCI's website sim.mci.ir or at stores across the country. Prepaid SIMs are sold for a base price of 230,000 rials ($7 at market exchange rate) and contract SIMs sell for a base price of 1,308,000 rials ($40).
In April, the CEO of Telecommunications Company of Iran, the country's sole operator of landlines and a majority owner of MCI, announced that it was not in charge of distributing premium gold mobile numbers.
Kazem Ebrahimi said there is no official pricing structure for the sale of "gold numbers" and resellers are free to charge what they deem fit. In December last year, the most expensive number available on a local gold number website was 09121111*11. That number came in at a staggering 6.9 billion rials ($202,000 at the time).
A local number dealer said a majority of his “platinum” numbers–those over $100,000–were not sold to individuals.
