Vodafone, a British mobile operator, has bought Telsim, the second largest Turkish mobile operator. This is interesting to me since I spent some time working for the third largest mobile operator in Turkey, and currently work on the UK mobile industry. Telsim has a rocky past, they've always been a distant second to Turkcell, and has suffered from seriously dodgy owners, the Uzan family. The Uzan brothers founded Telsim, getting a ton of credit from the likes of Nokia to build their network, then refused to pay. For a while it looked like they'd get away with it, since they had more knowledge and connections in the Turkish legal and political systems, but in the end their business empire collapsed and was taken over by the government.

The interesting thing about the Turkish mobile phone market, at least 4 years ago when I was living and working there, was that very few people used monthly contracts. Most customers use "pay as you go", where you have to prepay for the time you will use. This was mostly down to price, the Turkish companies just didn't offer the kinds of deals that UK operators do. Vodafone may change this, they may even introduce contracts whereby people can get good phones at cheap prices when they sign a contract.

Turkey is a great market for mobile phones, it's such a social culture. I remember being impressed when I first visited Istanbul in 2000 at how pervasive they were. Mobiles were already common in the UK at the time, but in the US they still had an embarassing "yuppie" stigma.