Eventis

» see eventis.md as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Eventis Mobile was a joint venture registered in Chisinau that got a Moldovan GSM license in December 2006 and started selling service a year later, on 21 December 2007. It ran on the 900 and 1800 MHz bands as the country's third network, behind operators that already had the subscribers and the towers. Coverage reached four towns, Chisinau among them, and never the whole country. Its numbers all began +373 650, and its network code was 259 04.

About 25,000 people were on it. That is small enough that in Turkey it would not have registered as a national network at all, and it is the fact that makes the rest of this legible: a carrier with 25,000 subscribers has no cushion and no bank willing to wait. I have never been to Moldova and I had never heard of this company before a defunct-operator category handed me the name.

The money ran out before the service did. A Chisinau economic court opened insolvency proceedings against Eventis Mobile on 20 February 2010 and appointed Veaceslav Apostol as insolvency administrator. The network then kept carrying traffic for almost another year, which is the part worth noticing: Moldovan subscribers spent 2010 on a phone network that was already in the hands of a court.

~ the dossier ~

~ the night it stopped ~

On Friday 5 February 2011, at around half past six in the evening, the network stopped working. The company's website and its helpline numbers went down at the same moment, so a subscriber whose phone had just lost signal had no way to find out whether the problem was the handset or the company.

The English Wikipedia article on Eventis adds that it may well be the first operator anywhere to have ceased existing with no warning or information at all. That is a superlative with no citation behind it and no way to check it, so treat it as the editor's impression rather than a record. What does hold is the narrower claim: nobody published a farewell page or a customer notice, so the shutdown has to be dated off the evening people noticed their phones had stopped.

~ the license ~

The paperwork outlived the network by years. ANRCETI, the Moldovan communications regulator, had suspended the license and then at one point agreed to extend that suspension by a further two months at the insolvency administrator's own request, which is the regulator keeping a dead operator's permit alive so that the liquidation could be conducted tidily. Its administrative board finally voted to withdraw the license on 16 August 2013, thirty months after the last call. Creditors spent the years either side of that in the Moldovan press and courts, arguing about who was being paid and with whose money, and the Supreme Court of Justice eventually ruled in the regulator's favor.

eventis.md does not resolve. The only copy of its home page anybody can still open is an Internet Archive capture from April 2008, which is what Wikipedia links where the official website would normally go.

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