Mobile phone service provider Cellular One is on the verge of extending its roaming reach to South America and may even beat new entrant Telecom to offering roaming in the UK and Europe.

"People from South America should be able to roam in Bermuda and Bermudians should be able to roam in South America," said Cellular One spokesperson Elaine Joe.

"Basically it expands our footprint, because now we have the US, Canada, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Hong Kong." Initial clients for the South American network, which is being negotiated with Bell South, are expected to be high net worth individuals who may be frequent travellers to the region in search of investment opportunities or property acquisition.

Joe said South American roaming should be ready by the end of April. Joe also revealed that Cellular One customers may soon be able to roam in the UK andEurope. That, she acknowledged, was a competitive necessity.

Telecom announced last year that they will be entering the mobile market with GSM technology -- the most advanced standard for seamless worldwide coverage (except Japan).

But it now seems likely that the newest entrant to the local market will miss their stated April deadline for launching the service which gives Cellular One more time to beef up their offerings.

The company does not have GSM technology -- yet.

But Joe told the Royal Gazette that it was "seeking a solution" for offering mobile service in the UK and Europe by the end of June.

"Depending on the competitive climate it may be sooner" she said.

Meanwhile, Telecom is having to swallow lofty promises made last year when it announced that a GSM network will be up and running in April.

Contacted by the Royal Gazette , Firoz Kassam, Telecom's vice-president of marketing and business development, would only say "we have a timetable and we are working toward it." The Island's first telecommunications company and the only one that is 100 per cent Bermudian-owned caused some concern among the upper echelons of Cellular One when it announced its mobile ambitions.

Chief operating officer Michael Leverock, arguing that island rates were already quite low in comparison with the rest of the world, said that he feared a price war and doubted whether the local market could support three mobile service providers.