Setting up a mobile phone service in North Korea – an authoritarian state that has banned mobiles – may sound like a misguided venture but Egypt’s Orascom reckons it can defy conventional wisdom when it starts operations there on monday.

Orascom is confident North Korea is opening up its economy and says it has been assured by the ­government that everyone will be allowed to buy a mobile. However, experts think that such a volte-face is highly unlikely and reckon only senior military and government officials will be allowed access, and then only to a closed network.