Anthony Masunga discusses popular services, main operator challenges and money services, ahead of VAS Africa this June

Anthony Masunga, COO

Botswana Telecom

VAS Africa speaks with Anthony Masunga ahead of VAS Africa this June

VAS Africa: Please describe your company’s position and objectives in Africa

Anthony Masunga: My company (Botswana Telecommunications Corporation including beMOBILE) is evolving from single lines of business (Mobile, Fixed, Internet) into a converged operator. These changes were introduced in 2013 through organisational restructuring and will be supported by massive investment in technology to support the strategy of fixed mobile convergence. In addition to that, changes at shareholding level will involve partial privatisation of the whole company which would see the Government of Botswana listing 49% of the shares in the local Botswana Stock Exchange.

VAS Africa:  What do you think are the top 3 major trends affecting your business in the region in 2014?

Anthony Masunga: Consumer Demand: Access to Affordable, high quality internet

Capex for Fixed Access Network: Investment in the access network to improve wireline broadband connectivity vs returns

Capex for High Speed Mobile broadband (LTE and 3G): Investments in the mobile networks to improve mobile broadband experience vs. returns

VAS Africa:  Which do you consider to be the most popular services for African consumers and enterprises?

Anthony Masunga: Mobile money transfer for the consumers

VAS Africa: What are the main challenges operators need to adapt to in order to deliver attractive services to their customers?

Anthony Masunga: Truly identifying the needs of the customers (African markets differ from country to country and no single solution is fit-for-all markets)

VAS Africa:  What is the best way forward for operators and OTT players – competition or partnership?

Anthony Masunga: Partnership (Lowers opex for operators and improves time-to-market).

VAS Africa:  How are mobile money services likely to evolve in the years to come?

Anthony Masunga: More public utility companies will embrace the technology and it will be used for purchase of water, power, TV subscription and social payments.

VAS Africa:  How do you see mobile fitting into marketing and advertising campaigns?

Anthony Masunga: It will just be a cheaper and more direct form of marketing and advertising campaigns provided issues of SPAM are addressed

VAS Africa: Which companies are showing most innovation in the region and what can be learnt from them?

Anthony Masunga: First National Bank in partnership with different Mobile Networks for money transfer and payment services (e-wallet, m-wallet and payments)

See Anthony Masunga speak on the 24th June at 12:40! 

Friday News Round-Up

Hot Stories in Emerging Markets

Are the BRICS building legal barriers to social media?
http://memeburn.com/2012/04/are-emerging-markets-clamping-down-on-social-media/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+memeburncom+%28memeburn%29

Safaricom, Qualcomm team up for ‘3G Experiential Tour’
http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2012/04/12/safaricom-qualcomm-team-up-for-3g-experiential-tour/

4 Ways Mobile Technology Can Improve Care
http://africahealthitnews.com/blogs/?p=1191

Mideast telcos eye profit in mobile advertising
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=495061&version=1&template_id=48&parent_id=28

Nokia unveils ‘starter’ phone in Nigeria
http://www.biztechafrica.com/article/nokia-unveils-starter-phone-nigeria/2528/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+biztechafrica%252FCgBD+%2528BiztechAfrica+News+updates%2529

Etisalat to boost network coverage
http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2012/04/11/etisalat-to-boost-network-coverage/

Blog Spot
Eat Out speak at East Africa Com; hear from the Founder of the leading restaurant guide, content provider & marketing consultant for restaurants
http://comworldseries.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/eat-out-speak-at-east-africa-com-hear.html

‘Makes You Think’ Video

Did You Know - Mobile Stats for Africa 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kamlf-uAHU&feature=youtu.be

Infographics of the Week
Is Mobile Africa’s Future?
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/share/19jan2012/mobile_africa/

Report of the Moment
Mobile Africa Report 2012
http://www.mobilemonday.net/reports/MobileAfrica_2012.pdf

Informa bullish on mobile data during the economic downturn

During my time with Informa Telecoms & Media I have not had the opportunity to consult with Mark Newman, our Chief Research Officer, anything like a regularly as I would have liked. The last time I had cause to do so was in the lead-in to December's GSM>3G Middle East conference in Dubai, at which Mark was in the Chair, sharing the stage with heavy-hitters from the likes of Etisalat, Zain, Turkcell and Nawras. At that event, all of these companies made very positive noises about mobile data services in the context of the markets which they serve.

Yesterday, in Informa's telecoms.com blog, Mark reported a general feeling of optimism around mobile data worldwide. Mark began by noting the "widely held view that the mobile content sector is failing to live up to expectations, 3G has disappointed and mobile operators have thrown away an opportunity to develop a revenue stream that could ultimately surpass the voice business."

Mark feels that "if 2008 is remembered for one thing, it should be for being the year that this notion was dispelled. Until last year, the non-voice business was dominated by SMS. For a typical European operator, SMS accounted for up to 80% of non-voice revenues in previous years. But this figure has started to fall sharply. Operators such as Vodafone are seeing non-SMS services generating up to half of non-voice revenues. Investment in 3G - or 3.5G - is now generating payback."

While pointing out the erroneous nature of the idea that North America is a laggard in terms of mobile data adoption, Mark notes that Japan and South Korea continue to be the real hotbeds of enthusiasm for data services. This has been a well-worn truism for as long as I've been attending conferences and workshops themed around boosting the acceptance and profitability of mobile content, data and value-added services. I recall being asked to take over the running of a London conference about five years ago and hearing all kinds of actors in the mobile VAS value chain complaining about revenue sharing arrangements with operators and MNOs' 'walled garden' approaches. The participants were at least 90% European and content providers and aggregators were much better represented than network operators. Everyone seemed to be casting envious glances at their Japanese and Korean counterparts, speaking warmly about how the likes of NTT DoCoMo were enabling the growth of a healthy mobile content ecosystem.

Only last week, when I was asked to make a presentation on mobile social networking at the most recent Mobile Monday Istanbul meeting, I found myself referring constantly to the greater success of some of these services in the Far East. Quoting from an Informa Telecoms & Media report, I told the Turkish audience that according to a Sydney Morning Herald article published in December 2007, half of Japan’s top 10 works of fiction are now written on mobile handsets. These works, called keitai shousetsu’, each sells an average of 400,000 copies and are written entirely on cell phones complete with emoticons and common SMS abbreviations.

Today, according to Mark Newman, the ratio of prepaid subscribers to postpaid goes a long way toward accounting for the differences among markets in mobile content adoption and usage. Postpaid subscriptions account for 99% of all subs in South Korea, 94% in Japan and 90% in the US. Mark points out that these are the countries with the highest mobile data ARPUs.

Overall, Mark feels that even if the most pessimistic scenarios for the economic downturn come to pass, it seems unlikely that the mobile content sector will stop growing. Mark points out that 2008 saw a switch to flat-rate and mobile Internet models and believes that 2009 will see this trend continue and will see the arrival of more-affordable mobile Internet devices. For Mark "the bigger uncertainty is whether mobile operators will accept a role as dumb pipes rather than continuing to invest in their own services and smart-pipe strategies. "

Today I should complete handing over my notes to colleagues who will be developing our annual Russia & CIS Com conference, set to take place in Moscow in early June. With the Russian MNOs having now deployed 3G networks in most major cities, our research respondents have expressed the desire to use the event to debate how best to accelerate the process of getting a return on these investments by encouraging customers to accept mobile data and content services.

3G Americas on LatAm region's contribution to the 4 billion global mobile subs

Just before the Christmas break, our friends at 3G Americas flagged up a historic milestone for the cellular industry, announcing that as of December 2008 there exist "4 billion connections to mobile devices worldwide." Citing the number crunching of our very own market watchers at Informa Telecoms & Media, the GSM family-focused wireless industry trade association noted that this "represents 60% of the entire global population today" and that "in some countries, millions of people are now experiencing connectivity to the world for the first time through wireless and changing their economic, social and political fortunes forever."

The 3G Americas release goes on to quote Marisol Gomez, our LatAm region analyst, with whom I've had the pleasure of working in the last few months. Marisol says: "the Latin America and Caribbean region continues to show steady consumer growth with 16% year-on-year growth as subscription numbers are expected to reach in excess of 440 million, equating to 76% penetration."

I remain keen to keep an eye on the Latin American mobile scene, not least because preparations for the next GSM Americas/Americas Com conference are well underway. As part of this, the Com World Series team is now working much more closely with our Sao Paulo-based colleagues at sister company Informa Brasil. Marisol and I have both been involved in detailed briefings designed to ensure that we harmonise our efforts with our Brazilian friends and jointly add value to an already well-established regional discussion and networking forum. We return to Rio de Janeiro for the 2009 iteration, hosting the event at the wonderful beachfront Windsor Barra Hotel 30th June-1st July.

It's gratifying to see the folks at 3G Americas continuing to cite Informa TM market information given that I've personally striven to develop further our partnership with Chris Pearson, who heads up the association and Erasmo Rojas, who leads activities in Latin America. For as long as I've been involved in our Americas event, Chris and Erasmo have jointly led a co-located 3G Americas Executive Briefing, which assembles CxO-level speakers from leading mobile carriers. We are on track to offer this feature of the conference once again in 2009, and both sides have been discussing how we can do even more to ensure that the audience maximises the opportunity to engage with the panellists and derive maximum value from their presence.

Chris and Erasmo both seem very keen that the wider conference begins to offer more insights around the roadmap for evolution towards LTE.

"Third generation technologies continue to evolve and the GSM operator today has a clear path towards LTE," stated Chris earlier this month. "In addition to the evolution to LTE by GSM operators, LTE is proving to be the technology choice for CDMA operators as well."

3G Americas quote Informa TM's estimate that there are nearly 415 million 3G subscriptions to date, with 77% share of the 3G market on UMTS/HSPA networks or 320 million connections, and the remaining 95 million on CDMA EV-DO. Our figures suggest that the number of commercial UMTS/HSPA networks has risen to 258 in more than 100 countries, including 41 networks in 20 countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region.

"HSPA and HSPA+ will compete with any and all mobile wireless technologies available today and in the near future," concludes Chris Pearson. "In fact, recent commercial launches of HSPA+, such as that of Telstra in Australia, are reporting peak theoretical downlink speeds of 21.6 Mbps. 3G is more than capable of delivering the bandwidth customers need today, and the emerging LTE technology provides us with a clear evolution path for the future."

Turkish 3G awards: no surprises

The stalling and wrangling is finally over: the Turkish Government has awarded 3G licenses. The surprises? None.

As confirmed by today's Global Mobile Daily, the three established cellcos, Turkcell, Vodafone and Avea, all bagged licenses, raising between them a total of €822 million (US$1.04 billion) for the state coffers.

Market-leading Turkcell (55.54% of the subscriber base, according to WCIS as of Sep 2008) won the ‘A’ licence with the largest bandwidth block of 40MHz, with a bid of €358 million. Vodafone Turkey (26.56% market share) was awarded a license in the 35MHz spectrum band after paying €250 million, while third-placed operator Avea (17.90% market share) was awarded a 30MHz operating license €214 million. The auction for a fourth bid was cancelled due to a lack of suitable bidders.

The 3G licensing process will not, therefore, introduce any new MNOs onto the Turkish market, as has been the case in one European country. A Romanian 3G licence was awarded to RCS & RDS, a cable MSO and broadband service provider with no previous mobility proposition. Having launched 3G services in December 2007, RCS & RDS has now built a mobile market share of just under 4.5% according to WCIS figures.

If operators do face any new competition for subscribers in the recently-initiated era of MNP in Turkey, this will come in the form of MVNOs, which look set to enter the market at some stage in 2009. Those who track the Turkish market will not be surprised to learn that MNO, MVNE and MVNO strategies are set to be discussed at length at our Istanbul Eurasia Com conference (31 March & 1 April 2009), which will gather delegates from Caspian and Central Asian markets as well as from the host country.

MegaFon, Kuzey Kibris Turkcell join speaker line-up for Eurasia Com 2009

I am pleased to announce the confirmation of two very strong additional speakers for Eurasia Com 2009 (Istanbul, 31 March & 1 April 2009), both representing influential cellcos in the region served by the conference.


Mr Alexey Nichiporenko is First Deputy CEO at Russia's MegaFon, and General Director, of MegaFon-International, the unit which manages the Russian MNO's subsidiaries beyond the Russian Federation. Mr Nichiporenko will be joining a day one round table discussion (on Tuesday 31 March), during which participants will be invited to comment on the Eurasia region's most promising remaining growth opportunities and the challenges operators can expect to face when working to exploit them.

Turkcell is also a significant player in the region, not least in the host country of our conference, where the cellco is the mobile market leader. For the past two years, Turkcell have strongly supported our event, sending large delegations of executives to enjoy the networking, discussions and presentations, as well as confirming CxO-level speakers from the company. We are in discussions with our friends at Turkcell now about who will represent the business at the lectern in 2009. In the meantime, a Turkcell subsidiary company has already confirmed its high-level participation.

Kuzey Kibris Turkcell operates in the Turkish Republic Northern Cyprus, where the company has recently rolled out 3.5G services over an Ericsson-supplied W-CDMA/HSPA network. The three MNOs in Turkey itself have yet to go to market with 3G services and of the Caspian and Central Asian countries from where we will be gathering delegates, only Tajikistan and Georgia have W-CDMA networks. We therefore expect there to be a strong interest in the detailed network/services-deployment case study that will be offered at the conference by KK Turkcell. The speaker will be Mr Burak Merzeci, the company's CMO.

We are having many positive conversations with invited participants and we confidently expect to assemble our strongest-ever speaker line-up for the event in 2009.

Eurasia Com 2009: welcome aboad, our first confirmed speaker

We would not ordinarily be confirming speakers for a March/April conference quite as early as this. With Eurasia Com 2009 scheduled for the last day of March and first day of April, my current focus is on catching up with the latest developments in Turkey, the event's host country and in the numerous former Soviet Republics of the Caspian and Central Asia regions, from where we draw a good number of our delegates. We are digesting all that is going on across these markets as well as asking the region's telco executives what our conference must feature in terms of participants, discussion themes and format in order to worthy of their expenditure on travel and time out of the office.

However, of the people I've spoken to thus far as part of this process, one stands out as an especially helpful and insightful research respondent. Cenk Soyak is the General Manager of MVNO/MVNE Effortel's presence in Turkey. Having earlier got the sense from other Turkish research respondents that the country's mobile sector's three hottest topics were MNP, the long-delayed arrival of 3G services and the business case for MVNOs, I was naturally keen to catch up with someone right at the centre of the discussions around the last of these. Cenk keeps a blog (in Turkish) to track what's going on in Turkey's MVNO space and was kind enough to provide an English language summary of many of the themes covered. As well as offering invaluable guidance on this topic, and on other developments in Turkey, I knew right away that Cenk would be an authoritative and lively conference speaker. I am therefore delighted to announce here that he has agreed to join the panel of speakers we will be building for our Eurasia Com conference.

My Russian-speaking colleague currently conducting research covering CIS markets has also had some really useful conversations, many with CxO-level people within a diverse range of telcos - from MNOs to state-owned incumbent wireline carriers. A number of these respondents have indicated a willingness to join the speaker panel in Istanbul, so I anticipate positive developments soon. If your organisation is serious about doing business with the telcos of this part of the world, I am confident we can save you a lot of time and money by putting you among the group we plan to assemble in Turkey in the Spring.

Catching up on developments across Eurasia

We will very shortly be getting to work on the arrangements for our 5th annual Eurasia Com conference and exhibition in Turkey. The event will take place 25-26 March 2009, with Istanbul being the host city for the third consecutive year, following on from an initial two years in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

For us, the term 'Eurasia' maps quite closely to TeliaSonera's use of this sometimes ambiguous word. With reference to the company's TeliaSonera Eurasia business area, the giant Scandinavian telco, like us, seems to use the term 'Eurasia' in the geopolitical sense, i.e. as a (neutral) way of referring to the post-Soviet states, in particular the Central Asian republics and the Transcaucasian republics.

So, our Eurasia Com conference, as well as attracting plenty of delegates from the host country's operators (Turkcell, Turk Telekom, Avea etc.), is really designed to offer networking and learning opportunities to execs from the service providers of Caspian states (Armenia, Azerbijan, Georgia) and 'the -stans' of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. Mongolian delegates have also shown up in pretty good numbers for the last two years.

We find that a number of tech vendors we speak with find this to be an interesting but challenging region. Growth potential is good: mobile markets are some way from reaching European-levels of penetration, 3G networks are not yet ubiquitous, wireline teledensity is quite low. However, my own experiences of developing contacts in this part of the world make me realise that it's not always easy for some companies to explore the possibilities and do business with the operators that are taking advantage of the growth opportunities. So we believe that our event offers a uniquely valuable one-stop shop for vendors looking to make improve their connections in this region.

I am therefore working to catch up with any interesting developments that have taken place across these markets since we last visited Istanbul in April this year. A notable one is TeliaSonera's integration of two previously separate mobile operators in Tajikistan, Indigo and Somoncom. These two companies were among the assets the Scandinavian telco acquired when it bought U.S.-based MCT Corp. back in 2007. MCT also had stakes in Coscom of Uzbekistan (now rebranded UCell) as well as a smaller stake in Roshan of Afghanistan. According to a Global Mobile Daily report last week, Ucell have just launched 3G services in the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand. This leaves Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan as the region's markets that had not reported W-CDMA subscriptions to the World Cellular Information Service by June of this year. Turkey's 3G licensing process has been much delayed so, overall, I expect Eurasia Com to be attended by a lot of delegates who have yet to gain extensive experience working in a market where 3G services are available. If that translates into pent-up demand to learn from colleagues who do have useful experiences and insights to offer, we should see very lively networking and discussions.

Etisalat to do battle with Zain in Iraq?

Much as Iraq is rarely out of the news, the country is rarely very far from my thoughts at the moment as we gear up for our GSM>3G Middle East event in Dubai this December.

I was prompted to think again about Iraq this morning by a call confirming a meeting tomorrow with Bob Fonow, now working with broadband service provider Trivon, which operates under the Virgin Connect brand in Russia. Bob has lately been an enthusiastic and high-value speaker at a number of Informa Telecoms & Media conferences, including some of our Com World Series gatherings. In a previous role, Bob was a Senior U.S. State Department official responsible for telecommunications reconstruction in Iraq, acting as a Senior Adviser to the Minister of Communications and Chief Executive of the Communications and Media Commission. In this role, Bob managed a staff of US State Dept technical experts and was responsible for funding decisions and program management of US funded telecom programs. Following that assignment, Bob was hired to mediate a dispute between the Iraqi shareholders of Zain Iraq and Zain's executive management in Kuwait concerning the provision of physical security for Zain's combined MTC Atheer and Iraqna GSM networks.

I am looking forward to learning a lot from Bob tomorrow. I think my questions will focus on two areas. Firstly, as my thoughts turn to our 2009 Russia & CIS Com conference, I'll be keen to get some fresh insights on the Russian broadband market and the currently high level of hype about the prospects for WiMAX in Russia. Secondly, ahead of the Dubai event, I'll be keen to get Bob's thoughts on the potential and the challenges of the Iraqi market. It will be good to get a solid briefing before meeting the several high-level execs who will be representing Iraqi operators on the panel of speakers in Dubai. These include Suleiman Lamaani the CEO of Itisaluna (an emerging nationwide operator providing fixed-line voice services, broadband, and VAS via CDMA 1x-EV-DO Rev. A) and CxOs from GSM operators Korek Telecom and Asiacell. Looking ahead to the future development of our event, it is my theory that vendor interest may become very sharply focused on under-connected, under-penetrated markets such as Iraq and Iran, whose incumbent mobile operator MCI will be represented at this year's conference by CEO Vahid Sadoughi. This may become a matter of urgency for network tech vendors as the oil-rich Gulf states' mobile markets all reach saturation point and 3G networks there achieve wide coverage.

Certainly, the Iraqi market is already a priority for giant rival Middle Eastern telcos. Zain is already present and I read today in a Cellular news story the UAE-based Etisalat is reported to be in talks to acquire an Iraqi mobile operator by the end of this year. The story quotes Etisalat COO Ahmad Julfar: "Iraq has a lot of potential because of the unavailability of fixed-line telephones because of war conditions."

Given the strong interest in Iraq from around and beyond the region, I am really glad that we've managed to get the Iraqi market so well represented on our panel of speaker for the Dubai show.

3G coverage widens across former Soviet Union

Telecoms.com reported yesterday that one of Russia's big three cellcos has stolen a march on its competitors in terms of extending 3G coverage to part of Siberia and the far east of the Russian Federation. The MTS W-CDMA footprint now reaches the cities of Novosibirsk, Norilsk and Vladivostok with HSPA-enabled services.

As we prepare for the two Com World Series conferences which gather telco execs from CIS markets, I shall be asking whether discussions around extending 3.5G to these markets' outlying regions remains a hot enough topic to warrant significant talking time. The first of these will be our annual Eurasia Com event in Istanbul (next: March 2009), where delegates from the host country's telecoms operators are joined by colleagues from the Caspian Sea region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and the five other former Soviet Republics of Central Asia - the markets I've taken to calling the 'the Stans' for short: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan etc.

MTS also has 3G deployment plans in that part of the world. The company holds 3G licenses in Uzbekistan and Armenia, where I believe the networks are scheduled for launch in 2009. As far as I know, that would put MTS first-to-market with 3G services in both countries.

However, W-CDMA networks have been live for some time in other parts of the region. I've twice had the pleasure of meeting David Lee, the British CEO of Metromedia-owned Magticom, one of Georgia's three MNOs. David has been kind enough to participate at both Eurasia Com and the Moscow-hosted Russia & CIS Com. Magticom was a 3G early mover, starting work on its W-CDMA network in 2005. At both conferences, David shared some useful insights his team has picked up along the way. By December 2006, our WCIS database was indicating that Magitcom's Turkcell/TeliaSonera-backed rival Geocell had its first few 3G subscriptions.

Tajikistan was also an (unlikely-seeming?) 3G pace-setter, with Babilon Mobile going first-to-market in 2005.

As preparations get underway for Eurasia Com 2009, I look forward to reacquainting myself with all these developments in the coming weeks. It's a fascinating region.

Nawras CEO joins GSM>3G Middle East speaker panel

I was delighted to hear from Omani MNO Nawras this morning, confirming the participation of CEO Ross Cormack on the panel of speakers at our GSM>3G Middle East TOWARDS A BROADBAND WORLD event in Dubai this December. Ross has been a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the conference and it will be a pleasure to welcome him and his colleagues once again.

Since Ross participated at the 2007 version of the event, Nawras have gone first-to-market with 3.5G services in Oman. Nawras competes in the cellular space with the mobile business unit of incumbent carrier Omantel. Oman Mobile has yet to deploy a 3G network, but in February this year it was reported that Huawei had undercut Ericsson and Nokia Siemens networks to win the Oman Mobile contract for the building out UMTS coverage. I notice that this report describes Oman Mobile as "one of the few cellcos in the Middle East yet to build a 3G network'. I beg to differ. Referring to the invaluable World Cellular Information Service from Informa Telecoms & Media, I can see that 3G networks are as yet absent in all of Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. We expect all of these countries to be well represented at our December conference, as well as good-sized contingents from South Asian, North African and West African markets where mobile carriers are associated with Middle Eastern shareholders/owners. So I have proposed that Ross Cormack speak on the theme of gaining competitive advantage through the first-to-market deployment of a 3G network. That ought to be useful for delegates from those countries.

I am also mindful of the fact that the Omani market has recently opened up to MVNOs and mobile resellers, so a possible alternative presentation topic for Ross would be to look at how far market liberalisation and the emergence of this kind of new entrant compels established players to sharpen their focus on understanding and maximising customer value.

Two of the MVNOs concerned, FRiENDi mobile and Majan Telecom are already confirmed participants at our conference. The former will be represented by Fayez Husseini (SVP, Business Development), the latter by the company CEO Niklas Nielsen. So we are well on the way to having the Omani telecoms sector very well represented at the conference.

Millicom 3G deployment announced across entire LatAm footprint

Telecoms.com, the leading news and opinion telecoms sector website operated by Informa Telecoms & Media, reports today that Millicom International Cellular plans to have launched 3G services in all of its Latin American markets by the end of this year. The mobile group, headquartered in Luxembourg has already launched 3G in Guatemala, Honduras and Bolivia. Launches in Paraguay (today), El Salvador (tomorrow) and Colombia (by the end of 2008) are all set to follow.

I had the pleasure of visiting two of Millicom's Tigo-branded operations while touring South America in April this year. In both Paraguay and Bolivia, I was struck by the very high visibility of the brand. I also learned a little about the Bolivian operation's WiMAX launch, but was in the country a little too early for the full commercial 3G deployment.

This recent announcement supports my personal belief that tech vendors looking to tap into major big CAPEX in Latin America will soon need to look beyond the strong growth story in mobile. Once 3G networks are rolled out across the whole region, I wonder which technology area will offer the best growth prospects. It was this line of thinking which prompted us to broaden the focus of our long established Latin America region conference and exhibition. What was once 'GSM Americas', is now a more holistic event in terms of welcoming every kind of telecoms service provider - fixed/mobile/integrated; traditional telecoms space/cable MSO/emerging forms of service provider.

This year's event is imminent. My team and I board the plane to Rio de Janeiro this Saturday in time to set up for next week's conference on 9-10 September. We'd love to see you there. If you represent any telecoms operator, we can still admit you free of charge. Register at:
www.ComWorldSeries.com/americas

Looking ahead to insights from Ecuador at this year's Americas Com

Yesterday's Cellular News arrived in my inbox, bringing to my attention another WiMAX deployment in Latin America, this time by Ecuadorian state-owned carrier, Pacifictel. Airspan are supplying the base stations and CPE. I would be interested to know if there are plans for Pacifictel's sister company Andinatel to select the same kind of equipment and offer similar services, mainly because of a few snippets my team picked up while trying to secure the participation of Ecuadorean telcos at our imminent Americas Com conference and exhibition (September 9-10, Rio de Janeiro). We try to avoid asking telco executives to talk on very generic subjects, preferring to link each prospective speaker with something genuinely novel and value adding for the hundreds of telecoms sector delegates we gather from across South and Central America.

In the case of these two state-owned telcos from one of only two countries in South America not to share a border with the host country of the conference (ten points for telling me the other one without using Wikipedia!), we learned that plans are afoot at least to investigate the logic and processes around merging what are currently quite separate businesses. In case it's not obvious from the companies' names, Andinatel serves the Ecuadorean interior region while Pacifictel offers services in the ten coastal provinces. The companies are also aligned with Alegro PCS, a CDMA mobile operator (also state-owned), which lags far behind its two GSM rivals in terms of market share. According to Informa Telecoms & Media's invaluable World Cellular Information Service, Alegro's share of subscriptions shrank from 4.03% down to 3.00% in the period March 2008 to June 2008, losing further ground to Telefonica-backed Movistar Ecuador and América Móvil-owned Porta, whose website seems to be announcing the availability of 3G services.

When talking to industry-watchers about what Andinatel and/or Pacifictel might add to an already compelling conference agenda, we picked up on merger talk. Confirmed by a Telegeography story, we learned about about reports in the country's La Hora newspaper detailing a strategic planning consortium/council which plans to design a unified corporate policy and manage the operators' infrastructure. These plans apparently include integrating the mobile business into a future merger.

Back in April, I had the considerable pleasure of visiting telcos in Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay. In the latter two countries, we visited a number of cooperative-owned LECs and the state-owned incumbent fixed-line operator respectively. I was struck by the relatively modest scale of these organisations and wondered privately whether the Bolivian telecoms sector especially might not benefit from some level of consolidation. Currently, the competitive landscape in wireline looks like this: Entel is the incumbent long-distance carrier (and is associated with Entel Movil, an MNO), but the co-ops do better in terms of the local exchange market. Each major city/region is home to its own telecoms co-op. We visited two of the more significant ones away from the country's capital. Given that we've enjoyed some success in attracting the Bolivian co-ops to this year's Americas Com, I thought it might be instructive for them (and other relatively smaller telcos from similarly fragmented markets) to learn more about the proposed Andinatel-Pacifictel-Alergo merger.

While we remain unsure of whether any of this trio will be sending representatives, we did manage to secure the participation of ETAPA, a telco based in the country's third largest city, Cuenca. ETAPA General Director Boris Piedra will join the panel of speakers, speaking about the company's efforts to bridge the digital divide between the information society haves and have-nots. I really look forward to learning about this in more detail at the event - and I must admit, I'm also looking forward to another benefit of attending Americas Com in Rio - getting away from this thoroughly miserable on-off English summer...

Americas Com: fixed, mobile and integrated telcos converge on Rio de Janeiro

I was interested to see Cellular News today picking up a recent Signals Telecom Consulting report on the implementation and effects of Mobile Number Portability across Latin America and the Caribbean. This is a timely read for me as I gear up for our Americas Com conference next month in Rio de Janeiro. We ran the conference successfully as 'GSM Americas' for 12 years, working to gather delegates from all over South and Central America for two days of networking and the opportunity to benchmark strategies and technology choices with colleagues from comparable markets. I have only been personally involved in the conference since mid-2007 and really enjoyed last year's iteration, which we held in December, also in Rio. If Americas Com is at all typical of a South American telecoms industry conference, I'd say that visitors from outside the region would be pleasantly surprised at how readily delegates there get stuck into the post-presentation Q&A sessions, the offline networking in the exhibition - anything which presents an opportunity to discuss rather than merely absorb the words of the great and the good up on the conference podium.

While much of the value of the region's telecoms sector continues to be in mobile, our analysts' excellent output reminds us that cellular markets in Latin America are maturing fast towards the point of saturation. Mobile operators may soon find it tougher to grow their businesses by acquiring wholly new customers, even in some of the region's less affluent countries. It remains to be seen whether there will be a good level of solvent demand for ARPU-boosting value-added services. Many operators must believe there will be.

Given the scale of recent investments in 3G networks and HSPA in markers such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile, operators will be hoping that lower levels of fixed-line teledensity and PC penetration will enable them to position 3G devices as the most pervasive means of accessing the Internet and participating fully in the information society. I'm not in the business on this blog of making predictions. My role as a facilitator of networking between telecoms operator execs worldwide (and their suppliers, partners etc.) does not really qualify me to to do so. However, I do need to be mindful of for how long it will be relevant (and profitable!) for us to assemble a group drawn solely from the celluar space. My reasoning is that with 3G networks already deployed and markets becoming quite mature, we need to watch out for any possibility of a future period of slower mobile operator CAPEX - or even just a dearth of hot topics around which to hang a compelling conference agenda. So we have needed to find a way of connecting our event sponsors with BOTH our loyal, core group of mobile sector execs AND a potentially much larger group from every other kind of telecoms service provider.

Happily, a logical and topical conference agenda is possible under these circumstance. All over the world (albeit moving at different speeds) we see the blurring of the once very sharp distinction between the mobile and fixed line worlds. We see telecoms operators with both fixed and mobile networks/business units seeing opportunities not only to make cost savings but also to achieve effective differentiation by blending their wired and wireless offerings. We see 'mobile only' players looking for partners in the wired world in order to compete in this new FMC space. We see 'fixed only' service providers wondering if they can survive long-term with no mobility proposition. All of this is made possible by the development of convergence-friendly IP core networks and the coming together of wireless access technology standards.

It has therefore been quite straightforward to gather speaker panels and groups of delegates which reflect these convergence trends at our Com World Series events. Americas Com 2008 is no exception. We will be welcoming the usual great speaker line-up from major mobile operators such as TIM Brasil, Ancel, Movistar Chile, Iusacell and Claro Brasil. What's new for 2008 is the presence of a really diverse spread of other kinds of telco:

• state or co-operative-owned telcos from Andean markets - such as Bolivia's COTEL and Ecuador's ETAPA
• cablers such as Mexico's Cablecom
• competitive broadband/voice carriers such as Mexican Alestra

Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires have been among the better locations for this annual conference, but one effect of hosting the event either in Brazil or a Conosur location has been making it challenging to draw participants from Andean countries and Central America. So it has been really gratifying to confirm the participation of companies from both these important regions.

So with about 4 weeks to go before Americas Com 2008, we are excited by the diversity of the audience we have assembled - and to see that numbers are tracking ahead of the delegate booking pattern for 2007.