Late last month, I received the notes put together by the Sao Paolo-based research team who have been busily preparing for this year's Americas Com event (30 June & 1 July, Rio de Janeiro). My Brazilian colleagues have been asking which hot topics should form the basis of the conference agenda, directing their questions to managers and strategists from telcos across Latin America.
One suggestion from respondents is that we include a round table session on the practicalities of implementing Mobile Number Portability (MNP). MNP was officially launched in Mexico in July last year, following a number of delays. In Honduras, the national telecoms regulator Conatel launched a public consultation on MNP in September, initially allowing operators Tigo, Claro, Hondutel and new entrant Digicel to consider proposals and offer comments. As of September 2008, Conatel had not yet made public a timetable for MNP. In the region's largest market, Brazil, the regulatory agency required the country's MNOs to go live with MNP by September 1 2008.
The roundtable suggestion seems to be a good one - we could have the optimum mix of participants with recent experience of MNP and others with a pressing need to anticipate the business and technical challenges.
Meanwhile, MNP appears to be causing some degree of controversy in India. Yesterday's Global Mobile Daily had news of the country's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) planning to begin accepting bids from applicants hoping to act as MNP clearing houses by mid-January. Bids are due to be opened on February 5th, according to local reports. The GMD piece goes on to say that "the DoT still faces key questions before it introduces MNP, most notably whether CDMA
operators will be able to automatically transfer their subscribers across to GSM services, a move strongly opposed by GSM players who say that CDMA players will transfer subs en masse to try and secure additional GSM spectrum."
I imagine that one CDMA player that could seek to gain from this alleged wheeze would be Reliance, which has finally launched its GSM services in the blue-chip market of Mumbai and has launched into the market with an aggressively priced plan offering subs free airtime worth NR10 S$0.21) per day for the first 90 days of a new subscribers' contract after an initial charge of just INR25. Reliance is offering new GSM subs local call rates of INR0.01 per minute and STD call ates of INR1.50 per minute with subs able to top up their accounts with prepaid packs offering NR10 to INR500 of value once they have used their daily free allowance. In addition, Reliance SM subs will get free unlimited talk time on the company's GSM and CDMA networks between 2200 and 0600 throughout Mumbai, Goa and Maharashtra. Reliance says it will be announcing additional prepaid tariff plans over the next three months.
In case you're surprised by the amount of detail in the above paragraph, I should admit to having grabbed most of it from the same edition of Global Mobile Daily. I won't pretend suddenly to have become an expert on the Indian mobile scene. That said, I did enjoy a (too) short stint in charge of our India & South Asia event and it was with regret that I ceded the territory to a colleague as part of a reorganisation in the Com World Series team last year. It was an exciting part of the world in which to make contacts and do business and I maintain an interest in developments there. For other readers who can say the same, I do recommend attending this year's India & South Asia Com, held once again in Mumbai - 12-13 May are the dates for your diary.
Showing posts with label CDMA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CDMA. Show all posts
30 Dec 2008
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."
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."
12 Aug 2008
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...
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...
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