On the WiMax front !
Mexican billionaire grabs WiMAX operation in Argentina
By Fernando Cassia in Argentina: 31st Aug 2006, 16:24
MEXICAN TELECOM entrepreneur Carlos Slim seems ready to fight the incumbents in Argentina with the announced move by Telmex to buy local ISP Ertach, which operates one of the two WiMAX networks in the country.
The news quietly hit the news wires last week, when only Reuters reported that Telmex "signed a preliminary deal" to buy the wireless broadband ISP for $22.5 million. Carlos Slim of Telmex is according to reports currently at number three in the World's billionaires list, and this acquisition -surely "pocket change" for him- will hopefully help consumers in Argentina get faster broadband, at better prices.
This is not the first purchase by the company, which previously snapped the local operation of AT&T and business communications provider MetroRed. Telmex Argentina currently has a local network for voice and data traffic, but customers not served by this backbone are reached by wireless means, with omni-directional "shared bandwidth" service for residential customers, and LMDS links for business. The company has been promoting for instance a "phone + broadband internet" wireless service bundle for around USD $60 a month, for which the company uses networking equipment from Canadian vendor SRTelecom, and operating in the company's licensed 3.3Ghz spectrum. The technology used for this service currently limits its speed to 1Mbit downstream for the internet service, plus giving the user up to two RJ11 analogue phone lines -which unlike VOIP services, these do support fax and v90 data modems, it should be noted-.
Attack by Air
Local Loop Unbundling is a phrase that has always irked the two incumbents, Telecom Argentina -owned by Italy's Telecom and a local group- serving the northern half of the country, and Telefonica de Argentina, owned by Spain's Telefonica group and which serves the southern halve. And currently, there is no such unbundling. The process which was started back in November 2000 and which would have allowed new players like Telmex or IPlan to access the customers via their existing copper wires stalled after the financial meltdown in 2001. Consumers have since been captive of the two non-competing incumbents when it comes to the speed of ADSL service - you can choose your ISP but the choice is an illusion, the data backbone and the DSLAMs -as well as the speeds and service levels- are set in stone by the incumbents which operate the backbone.
This leaves newcomers like Telmex with no option but to reach the customers by air. And this is where the acquisition of Ertach's WiMAX ISP will position Telmex as a major player. The broadband provider -formerly known as Millicom Argentina- began operating last year the country's largest WiMAX network, after winning a contract to build a "single data and phone network" for the province of Buenos Aires, linking 100 municipalities together in a single unified network that provides data and voice services to the city halls, police, school boards, and municipal public hospitals, among others. The company showed the Alvarion WiMax equipment of its choice at last years' Expocomm exhibition, see "Alvarion grabs WiMAX market in South America", here.
Victor Algara, General Manager of Telmex Argentina told local news magazine El Economista that the company currently has around 11% of the corporate market, and is aiming to reach one third of the pie. He said he expects the highest growth on the SMB (small to medium sized business) due to the economic recovery in the country. The report also mentions that Telmex holds the third place in the long-distance voice calls market, following the two incumbents.
Despite the record economy growth, some players reluctant to lay fibre
This scribbler has been suffering the limited upstream speeds of residential ADSL in Argentina for years. The best you can get is 256 kbps, and even by selecting the more expensive "corporate" cable modem service by some cable TV operators they limit you to a paltry 384 kbps. The only hope until now has been to use the services of one of the new players which arrived six years ago when the telecommunications market was opened to competition. Take for instance IPlan -an independent company and one of Telmex competitors- for instance: if you are luckily enough to live in a neighbourhood where IPlan has laid their fibre/copper networks, you can get a nice symmetric pipe to the Net, sometimes for less than $100 USD/month.
However, I have patiently waited for three years by now, and despite repeatedly reading about IPlan's network expansion and despite being only two blocks away from a major avenue along which one of IPlan's network optic fibres is laid, Pablo Subidet, General Manager the company IPlan told this writing geek: "the current and mid-term investment plans do not contemplate the construction (expansion) of the network that would allow us to fulfil your request". Two years ago, the company suggested I'd have to bear the cost of the network extension to reach my premises -remember the company's optic fibre cable passes two blocks away- and a company representative told me at the time it'd cost me around $7,000 greenbacks to pay for such network extension from my own pocket.
I celebrate, then, the prospect of a new player with big pockets like Slim's Telmex giving WiMAX the push it deserves in order to reach mainstream connected geeks who are desperate to escape the local-loop monopoly of ADSL and its absurdly low upstream speeds, and also the technically limited nature of cable modem based ISPs
