LATAM Telecom

This is a follow up to my recent post on a Cellular News article about the success of Telecom Argentina has had increasing SMS usage. I stated that this might indicate the need to pay more attention to other messaging services such as MMS, Instant Messaging, Personal Messaging as well as other data services. From the usage statistics we have from Pyramid Research (March 2008), we can see that SMS revenue for the Argentinean market represents more than 85% of total messaging revenues. While this is expected to change over time, the numbers we have clearly reflect that SMS is still the main source of revenue from messaging. In early 2007, Telecom Personal launched an initiative to evaluate Mobile Instant Messaging, following Telefonica Movistar's agreement with MSN, which was discussed in this blog (see here ). Telecom Personal went through the process of issuing an RFP and evaluating and selecting a vendor but in the end decided not to launch the service. I believe that was a missed...

This is a follow up to our last post from June! We took a long break but are back with more news and analaysis. It has been more than a month since the iPhone was first launched in Latin America, after much anticipation and a fierce battle between Telefonica and America Movil (see links here and here ). Now we hear that other major operators, as we anticipated here , are preparing for a possible iPhone launch, including TIM Brazil and Telecom Personal Argnetina. It is still early to evaluate results since the first launch (Telcel Mexico in July, Argentina and Chile in August) was only a few months ago, but it seems the rush from Telefonica Movistar to sell the iPhone might spoil the market. Moe on this in our next post ....

Big news from several sources including Cellular News : In a very short statement, Vodafone announced that it has secured an agreement to launch Apple's iPhone in ten countries. "Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia , the Czech Republic , Egypt , Greece , Italy , India , Portugal , New Zealand , South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network." Interestingly, TIM Italia also announced that they will offer the iPhone, making that country the first to offer the handset with multiple operators. We are still waiting for the official announcement regarding Latin America. With the Vodafone agreement in multiple countries, which apparently Apple was hesitant to do, we can now expect something similar from America Movil and Telcel. America Movil has 16 operations in the region including the largest operator in Latin America, Telcel Mexico. Neither TIM, Vodafone or the last announcement before these two, Rogers Canada, have g...

With the leak to El Universal informing us that Telcel will launch the iPhone later this year, we can expect intense competition for the iPhone in the rest of the region. It was clear that Apple was not going to favor a global operator over another one. However, it is unlikely that neither Telefonica nor America Movil were willing to accept this condition, so we can probably expect now that the rest of the America Movil operations will be rushing to prepare for the iPhone launch, beginning with the largest markets: Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. Given this scenario, the other big players in the region, Vivo, Tim Brazil, Personal Argentina will have to come up with a strategy to counter the iPhone hype. This is a good opportunity for operators to revamp their messaging and data strategies. So far, the intense competition between operators in the region has consisted mainly of trying to outdo each other with the end result being a very standard offering, where subscribers cannot really...

The initiative by Brazilian Operators together with GSMA is groundbreaking in Latin America, not only because of the imminent launch of Personal Instant Messaging in the region with all six operators offering interconnection but also for the fact that these operators are sitting together in a work group to define a product, evaluate vendors and complete a through study before launch. We expect that this will delay even more the launch of the service, which has been evaluated by operators like TIM, VIVO and Claro for at least two years now. However, the approach of this work group, led by Ms Paloma Vivanco of GSMA, will increase the likelihood of a succesful launch and service penetration. The work group met recently in Rio to discuss with different vendors their solutions. Among the vendors presenting were market leaders Acision, Colibira and Comverse, as well as an up and coming Uruguayan company, INI. The only other big IM vendor that always seems to be absent from Latin America init...

It appears that operators in Brazil are taking the lead now in deploying Personal Instant Messaging , following GSM Association's technical and commercial framework, which has already been deployed by other operators in Europe and Asia. The most interesting aspect of the efforts done by the largest operators in Brazil, including TIM, Oi, Claro and Vivo is adopting the framework proposed by GSMA, which allows interconnection. Other operators in Europe and Asia are already working with this framework, where interconnection is a key element. Even though operators in Brazil are still in initial stages, in discussions with different vendors, it appears that 2008 will be the year for Personal Instant Messaging in Latin America.