LATAM Telecom

With mobile penetration around the world reaching saturation, and the growth rate for traditional services flattening, operators are looking for new options to increase revenue. However, traditional services (voice, SMS) continue to be the main revenue generators for operators and there are still many interesting options to continue milking the cash cow. Services such as Ring Back Tones, MMS and Push e mail, when they were first introduced, created huge expectations that have not been delivered. In addition, operators get distracted by these new services and tend to overlook the basics. Voice mail, for example, is still the main call completion service and SMS continues to be the main messaging service worldwide; it is expected this trend will continue for the next few years. Operators can benefit from looking at options that sit on top of both services, to revitalize them and target missed opportunities. One of the key advantages to leveraging voice and SMS is that they can be used to...

This is a follow up to my post from October regarding the iPhone launch in Latin America (see here ). The battle between America Movil and Telefonica Movistar was settled after Apple signed with Movistar; we expected this to happen since the official announcement from America Movil did not mention exclusivity. As we know now, Mexico will be the only country where only one operator will have exclusivity, at least until 2009. In its rush to launch the iPhone, Telefonica Movistar did not launch Visual Voice Mail, unlike Claro / America Movil, who did include Visual Voice Mail, except for Comcel Colombia. How relevant can this be to the end user and to the overall strategy for both America Movil and Telefonica Movistar? As we have pointed out here before, the big risk for the iPhone in Latin America is to be just passing fad. Operators have the opportunity to make a significant impact with this device in terms of data usage, which so far has not been significant in the region (except maybe...