Will Zain become the EU of the mobile industry?

This is big news, disguised as small news: Zain's One Network system, which lets Zain customers roam across all the company's networks on a unified pricing package,

One Network means that a Sudanese Zain customer can make calls at local rates when they are in Jordan, Saudi Arabia or any of Zain's networks in the Middle East. You also recieve incoming calls at a single flat rate on any Zain network, can call your home country's customer care centre for free, and recharge your account using the local prepaid cards of the country you are in.

For a regional or global operator, doing this on your own network is a no-brainer. But Zain's new move, getting other major operators to join the system, is potentially game changing.

What One Network could end up becoming is a sort of European Union for mobile networks. Being an EU member is great for your citizens, because they get all sorts of benefits and life becomes better and easier. The wish to be part of the EU is so strong among regular people on the EU's periphery that it forces their governments to clean up their acts, reform, modernise and generally behave, so that they have a chance of one day joining the Union.

While One Network is not yet at this level of appeal, there are plenty of reasons why it will become better and better as time goes on to be part of some kind of multi-network alliance. The scale and collaborative benefits will make the customer experience better, and the union as a whole will be able to swing special deals and make special offers that no individual network could manage.

There's no reason to say that Zain's One Network will end up being the EU of mobile phones - it could turn out that someone else beats them to it. But they have been the global pioneers of this system and have a massive head start.

that outside companies can swim around in, but even they have not managed a similar kind of integration of pricing and services - and they have not yet welcomed other mobile networks onto the platform.

(By the way, it is stupidly obvious that I should be able to recharge my prepaid account in any country using local scratch cards. Seriously people, get it together.)

For now, 24 million Egyptian Mobinil customers join 27 million Zain customers in Iraq, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, on what is pretty clearly going to become the best option for a Middle Eastern operator looking to join a union of networks. My guess is, you will see a lot more of this kind of thing in the coming year or two.