June 30 of this year is a relevant date for Telefónica México. It will complete the third and final phase of the return of the radio spectrum, as well as the migration of its traffic to the AT&T network.
According to data from the consulting firm The Ciu, in Mexico the payment for the use of the spectrum represents between 22% and 30% of the operators’ income. This is because the payment for the right and use of bands in the country is one of the most expensive internationally. For example, in Mexico the payment for the rights to use the 859 MHz band is 1,479 pesos, while in nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), such as Australia, Canada, Germany and France, among others, It is 266 pesos. Another case is the cost of the right for the spectrum of the 600 MHz band, which in Mexico is 503 pesos and in the OECD nations it is 37 pesos.
The telecommunications company of Spanish origin decided at the end of 2019 to return to the State all the spectrum it had due to the financial burden that payment for the right and use of bands represented.
Currently, the company of Spanish origin has migrated its traffic from regions 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9 that correspond to the entities of Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas , Jalisco Michoacán, Nayarit Colima, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí Querétaro, State of Mexico, Mexico City, Hidalgo, Morelos and other locations.
In June of this year, it will return the spectrum of regions 2, 7 and 8, which are Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Sinaloa, Puebla and Guerrero.
Ana de Saracho, director of regulatory policy for Telefónica in Mexico, details that the company’s agreement with AT&T will allow the Spanish company to offer LTE (high-speed data transmission technology for mobile phones) in 158 cities, when before only the could offer in 37 cities.
The alliance with AT&T is the first of several that Telefónica will seek to do with various operators. “This first agreement allows us to make different alliances,” he says. “We will not rely on AT&T alone to grow and bring new coverage to our users.”
Telefónica will seek to be “the operator of the alliances,” says De Saracho, because through them it will be able to increase its presence in the country and its subscriber base using “these infrastructures that are often underutilized.”
More users thanks to Altán Redes
In addition to returning the spectrum and migrating its traffic to the AT&T network, Telefónica will seek to increase its presence in the country through the Altán network, thanks to an agreement it signed in February to bring 4.5G services to the points where it has a presence. the company in charge of deploying the Red Compartida.
By the close of 2021, Telefónica has reached 1,703 localities of less than 5,000 inhabitants, which means 290,000 potential users located in Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, Edo. Mex. Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Yucatan and Tlaxcala.
Telefónica México currently has 18.7% of the market share of mobile lines in the country.
For this year, the plan of the Spanish company is to cover another 1,084 locations in Campeche, Chiapas, Durango, Guerrero, Nayarit, Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Sinaloa and Sonora, which represents 468,000 potential users.
The commitment to 5G in Mexico
The trend in telecommunications is to go towards 5G, where Telcel and AT&T have started the race for the development of the fifth technology, but De Saracho says that in Mexico Telefónica will make the transition “in due time”, since for now the company seeks to focus on increasing and consolidating the business.
Ana de Saracho assures that for Mexico to have a ‘real’ 5G environment, which allows the development of assisted driving, telemedicine or the Internet of things, among many other applications, all operators must share their infrastructure, from a new spectrum, more towers and radios, even a huge amount of fiber optics.
“We are going to need access to a lot of antennas. At least from our side we do not consider it to be a possibility (5G) if all the operators try to do the same multiplication (of infrastructure)”, warned De Saracho, who sees in the infrastructure sharing model the most viable way to offer this technology. in the Mexican market.
Full IFT is required
Telefónica assures that it is necessary to strengthen the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), which is currently facing a human resources crisis. Three commissioners finished their terms within the IFT –Gabriel Contreras, Mario Fromow Rangel and Adolfo Cuevas–111 and until now the Executive has not filled the vacant positions of commissioners so that the Plenary of the IFT can operate correctly.
“It is not convenient for us to have a regulator diminished by the staff. It is important that there is a strengthened regulator. All the telecommunications reform that was carried out is based on having an autonomous body that did not respond to political issues, but was really focused on being a competition authority,” said De Saracho.
