NEW YORK-Nextel International Inc., Seattle, last week announced it launched commercial service of its integrated Digital Enhanced Network in Manila, Philippines, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Nextel International, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nextel Communications Inc., McLean, Va., owns 77 percent of Nextel S.A., the Brazilian iDEN service provider.
“The launch of service in Rio de Janeiro, together with our launch in Sao Paulo in May, provides Nextel International with a critical foothold in the two largest cities in Brazil and is key to our South American strategy,” said Keith Grinstein, president and chief executive officer of Nextel International.
Nextel International owns a 30-percent stake in Infocom Communications Network Inc., a Philippines paging carrier. Infocom debuted its iDEN service in Manila under the Nextel brand name.
“In the Philippines, Infocom’s launch of its iDEN system in Manila provides Nextel International with a key presence in another of the largest and most important commercial markets in the Asia-Pacific region,” Grinstein said.
iDEN, developed by Motorola Inc., integrates mobile telephony, digital two-way radio and text-numeric paging into a single handset. The digital two-way radio service, called Nextel Direct Connect, allows a subscriber to have conference calls with up to 100 people in his or her work group by pressing a single button.
Nextel International also has wireless interests and/or operations in Canada, China, Japan, Mexico and Peru.
After a three-week hiatus to resolve disputes over the wording of its promotional advertising, Comunicacion Nextel de Mexico S.A. resumed its promotion with new wording July 18, Robert Laing, assistant general counsel for Nextel International, said.
Nextel de Mexico changed its advertisements to coincide exactly with the verbage written into its license, so the ads now say its new service will offer “wireless access to the public telecommunications network and wireless data transmission,” Laing said. The carrier expects to launch commercial service in the greater Mexico City metropolitan area later this quarter.
Officials of the Mexico Federal Telecommunications Commission, or Cofetel, approved the new language before the ads were released, he added.
The earlier advertising said that Nextel’s new service would offer “mobile telephone and messaging service,” Laing said. Published reports indicated that Cofetel planned to fine Nextel for advertising services for which it doesn’t have licenses. Laing and Grinstein said they had received no official notice of Cofetel’s objections as of July 8 but had sought a meeting with federal regulators to resolve the apparent disagreement after reading about it in the newspapers.
Cofetel decided against fining Nextel for the wording of the earlier advertising, but its umbrella agency, the Secretary of the Telecommunications Ministry in Mexico, is deciding whether to do so, Laing said.
