CDMA moves south of the border: Iusacell will use Lucent equipment to launch service in Mexican markets

Although the state of Mexico's wireless network infrastructure remains behind that of other countries, several Mexican carriers have recently made progress by committing to deploy digital technology, specifically code division multiple access.

Within the last month, Iusacell, the leading wireless carrier in Mexico, named Lucent Technologies to provide it with CDMA equipment. Also, a purchasing consortium of four carriers-Bajacel, Movitel, Norcel and Cedetel-announced they will deploy $40 million worth of Motorola CDMA equipment.

Iusacell will deploy the Lucent CDMA equipment over the next 18 months. The company will launch CDMA service to customers in Mexico City during this quarter and will expand it throughout Iusacell's markets by the first quarter of 1999.

"It will not be an immediate replacement for our analog infrastructure, but it will be gradually deployed as an overlay," said a spokesman at Bell Atlantic, which owns Iusacell.

"Voice and call quality is their main concern in choosing CDMA, but the enhanced capacity is something they will want as their markets grow," said Jorge Duron, area operations manager in Mexico City for Motorola's Cellular Infrastructure Group.

Other advanced services that CDMA allows have the potential to quickly become popular in Mexico, said Duron.

In particular, increased competition between carriers, spurred by the launch of several new carriers, is driving the development of advanced services for competitive differentiation, said Guadalupe Perez, director of marketing at Lucent's Global Service Provider division in Mexico.

The new carriers, now bidding on frequency to enter the market, likely will build digital networks from scratch, she added.

The Mexican user base has been steadily increasing for several years and will continue to boom as digital networks are deployed.

Roaming between markets in Mexico and the U.S. also will become more important, said Motorola's Duron. One industry observer noted that many business wireless users doing business in Mexico, specifically those based in Los Angeles and New York, already are pressuring both U.S. and Mexican carriers to simplify roaming.

High business usage is one reason that Mexican carriers will initially focus digital deployment in Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara, the country's three largest industrial cities, said Lucent's Perez.

In the U.S., AirTouch has a CDMA network in the nearby Los Angeles and San Diego markets, Bell Atlantic has CDMA in New York and throughout the East Coast, and Primeco, a PCS affiliate of both U.S. carriers, offers CDMA in 11 U.S. markets.

"The trend in Mexico is CDMA," said Duron.

Still, Lucent's Perez anticipates that some Mexican carriers may also deploy time division multiple access, but deploying some type of digital technology is the main concern, she said.

Iusacell has analog infrastructure equipment from Northern Telecom and will continue to maintain a mix of equipment from different vendors in its networks, but Lucent will be Iusacell's primary CDMA equipment vendor, said the Bell Atlantic spokesman.

In the four-carrier agreement with Motorola, the vendor will be upgrading analog infrastructure it previously provided to the four carriers.

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