TelecomTV TelecomTV
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Events
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • DSP Leaders
  • Great Telco Debate
    • |
    • Follow
    • |
    • Subscribe
  • |
  • More
  • Webcasts
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Great Telco Debate
  • |
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • |
    • Subscribe
    • |
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Sign In Register Subscribe
    • Subscribe
    • Sign In
    • Register
  • Search

Business Models

Business Models

AT&T heads down Mexico way

Ian Scales
By Ian Scales

Nov 10, 2014

via Flickr © col&tasha (CC BY 2.0)

via Flickr © col&tasha (CC BY 2.0)

Having been thwarted over its M&A activities in its home market, AT&T has saddled up and headed south. It announced on Friday that it had agreed to buy Mexico’s third-largest mobile operator, Iusacell, for $2.5 billion.

When you mention Mexico in a telecoms story you know that the name Carlos Slim won’t be far behind and, lo, here he comes. The Mexican market is and will continue to suffer disruption as Slim’s dominant empire is broken up by the government there. That is a big opportunity for AT&T, of course, which hasn’t let sentiment (Slim’s America Movil  has been a long-standing partner) stand in the way of closing on a deal or two even if it  brings it into direct competion with Slim.

Most interesting, though, with the Iusacell acquisition AT&T is talking about extending joint services across both territories. The more usual ‘buy a foreign telco and run it seperately’ as has been done across most of Europe by the big groups (and for good reasons) may be about to be modified by AT&T. Last year the company seemed keen on being a catalyst in Neelie Kroes’ connected continent, although that scheme (whatever it was) appears to have gone off the boil. Perhaps AT&T’s current Chairman and CEO  Randall L. Stephenson, plans to use Mexico as a test case/demo for the advantages of cross-border build-out scale in telecoms.

In other news, Verizon and AT&T are going to interconnect their VoLTE (Voice over LTE) services so that users on one carrier can call and be called (using VoLTE) by users on the other. You might have thought such a connection was pretty-much the expected thing since the superior sound quality of a VoLTE connection would be lost if a VoLTE call originating on one network simply ‘fell back’ to a 2/3G or CDMA circuit when it had to traverse the network boundary.  In any case, in the fullness of time all the major mobile carriers are expected to support VoLTE so interconnection (you might think) would simply follow. Apparently not - the decision to interconnect is being hailed as if there was some measure of doubt around its happening at all. No doubt an alternative strategy for the early stages of deployment might have envisaged using VoLTE as an enhanced feature  and therefore a  draw for subscribers who really required the extra quality. This, after all, was the way SMS came blinking into the sunlight.

There has also been pressure applied by the GSMA which hasn’t given up on its (so far) ill-fated Rich Communications Services (RCS) push. It’s thought that VoLTE will establish a sort of enhanced services beachhead for RCS which will be able to layer itself on top of VoLTE’s commercial agreements and technical underpinnings.

The RCS Suite (already lanuched as Joyn in a handful of markets) was supposed to pick up the next generation enhanced services gauntlet by establishing an interoperable set of telco services for messaging, video and unified communications. But critics point out that RCS was obsolete before it came off the drawing board, OTT players having already created equivalents which worked more intuitively and at extremely low cost.  As a result RCS has been a relative failure so far. For one thing, it hasn’t been possible to get users to actually pay extra for them (rather than just have them bundled into the standard package). Supporters say that properly enhanced services will be added over time and will include ‘paid for’ components.

In that respect VoLTE seems to be following the Joyn example. Verizon plans to charge the HD VoLTE voice at the same rate as the current voice offering. Video calling will see data usage deducted  from the subscriber’s data bucket.

Both telcos’ engineers are working through testing and field trials and the commercial connections are expected to be made available in 2015.

Related Topics
  • 4G LTE,
  • Access Evolution,
  • Analysis & Opinion,
  • Business Models,
  • Industry Associations,
  • Mobile,
  • News,
  • Policy & Regulation

More Like This

Open Networking

Liverpool City Region announces construction of a 212 km high speed full fiber network

Feb 25, 2021

AI, Analytics & Automation

Siemens, IBM, Red Hat Launch Hybrid Cloud Initiative to Increase Real-time Value of Industrial IoT Data

Feb 24, 2021

Mobile

EE to extend 4G coverage in more than 500 areas in 2021 to boost rural connectivity

Feb 24, 2021

Cloud Native

Cloud access from edge to everywhere, claims multi-cloud solution provider

Feb 23, 2021

Digital Platforms & Services

Jio of India is now the strongest and fastest growing telecoms brand on the planet

Feb 23, 2021

Email Newsletters

Stay up to date with the latest industry developments: sign up to receive TelecomTV's top news and videos plus exclusive subscriber-only content direct to your inbox – including our daily news briefing and weekly wrap.

Subscribe

Top Picks

Highlights of our content from across TelecomTV today

On-demand Workshop: How to build your cloud native 5G core platform

16:48

The case for mmWave in 5G networks

25:55

The Private Mobility Opportunity for Enterprises

12:04

VMware learnings from DISH 5G rollout

  • TelecomTV
  • Decisive Media

TelecomTV is produced by the team at Decisive Media

Menu
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
 
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Events
  • About Us
Our Brands
  • TelecomTV Tracker
  • TelecomTV Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • The Great Telco Debate
Get In Touch
[email protected]
+44 (0) 207 448 1070

Request a Media Pack

Follow
  • © Decisive Media Limited 2021. All rights reserved. All brands and products are the trademarks of their respective holder(s).
  • Privacy
  • Terms
  • Legal Notices