Maravedis | January 26, 2011 | Cintia Garza
Latin America is the quietest region in terms of LTE deployments and operator commitments. Other regions such as Europe and Asia Pacific have shown much more LTE activity, accounting for 35% and 26% of the 145 LTE commitments registered worldwide in 2010. Latin America accounted for just 7% of the worldwide share, with 10 operator commitments and 7 LTE trials conducted during the year.
However, more and more Latin American operators are eager to take advantage of LTE’s promises of higher speeds, increased network capacity and more efficient spectrum use. Even regulators in countries such as Chile, Venezuela and Brazil are planning to allocate both residual 3G spectrum and new spectrum specifically for LTE. Maravedis estimates that by the end of 2011 there will be more than 20 LTE commitments in the region, an additional 7 LTE trials will be conducted, and possibly 4 operators will have commercially launched the technology, however the real momentum is expected to occur in 2014-2015, when we anticipate more than 25 operators will have commercial LTE services.
The first LTE operator activity in Latin America started in 2009 in Chile, where Entel conducted trials with Ericsson, Movistar with Nokia Siemens, and Claro, whose equipment vendor was not announced. Entel already offers WiMAX in the 3.5GHz band, but uses it to complement its fixed line service. The three companies are interested in LTE and have conducted trials actively, but they face a big hurdle, which is the lack of spectrum and spectrum caps imposed by SUBTEL to participate in the upcoming spectrum auctions. SUBTEL has ruled that existing players could participate in the upcoming auctions of 700MHz and 2.6GHz in July 2011, but if any operator surpasses the limit of 60MHz it would be obliged to return some spectrum to the state.
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