RIO DE JANEIRO – More than 400 million tourists expected in Brazil for global sporting events in 2014 and 2016 will be carrying LTE-ready mobile devices, and the industry is optimistic that it’ll have Brazil’s major cities’s networks ready by then, according to a senior adviser for the GSMA at Informa’s LTE Latin America conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“To provide coverage for a country the size of Brazil, with total area similar to the U.S., we’re going to need 800 mhz and must work to obtain it,” said Ricardo Tavares, senior advisor for Brazil’s GSM Association. “But this won’t be for 20 years time, but by 2015, if not before. It’s an important task for us all to work on together.”
The price of smartphones has been dropping rapidly in Brazil over the last two years, leading Tavares to project a “tsunami of data” on the way from buyers in Brazil’s expanding middle class. Brazil’s economy has been one of the fastest growing in the world over the past two years, not even experiencing a GDP loss during the heart of the global economic crisis in 2009 (when most countries did), and nearly 8% GDP growth last year.
“We’re going to have a revolution of content here,” Tavares said, citing both the pros and cons of that, including the stresses networks can experience with widespread social media use. He noted recent cases in the Middle East, where several countries blocked traffic to YouTube and Facebook during public protests, and data traffic fell more than 40% as a result.
“That shows us how we must manage this traffic, and its demand on networks for video and social networking,” Tavares said. “LTE really represents an opportunity for our country to participate in the world chain of innovation.”
