WASHINGTON-Even before the Federal Communications Commission can release proposed rules
to implement calling party pays service in the United States, its neighbor to the south will implement CPP, said Javier
Lozano Alarcon, president of Mexican Federal Telecommunications Commission known as Cofetel.
CPP is
expected to be available in Mexico by April, said Lozano. The FCC is not expected to release a CPP notice of proposed
rule making until at least May.
When CPP is implemented in Mexico, end users wanting calling party pays must be
given the service, said Lozano. If customers sign up for CPP, their telephone numbers will be prefixed with
044.
This three-digit designation also could be implemented as part of the CPP system in the United States, said Ari
Fitzgerald, wireless legal adviser to FCC Chairman William Kennard. “There has been some interest [in a three-
digit prefix but] there is a concern that it wouldn’t go” far enough on customer notification. For example, it
wouldn’t inform the caller of the cost of the call, Fitzgerald said.
If it is adopted, the prefix would be nationwide,
Fitzgerald said.
CPP still has its skeptics. Ambassador Diana Lady Dougan, who chaired the event, called it an
experiment which could lead to a billing nightmare. That notion was dispelled by Fulvio V. Del Valle, director-general
of Grupo Iusacell, who said it is not an experiment.
Grupo Iusacell is a company formed in partnership with Bell
Atlantic Corp. Bell Atlantic has been a strong proponent of CPP in the United States. Indeed, Del Valle said that in a
recent trip to Mexico, Bell Atlantic CEO Ivan Seidenberg said Mexico should not “repeat the mistakes the United
States made when it did not implement CPP.”
Lozano was the keynote speaker at a program examining the
Mexican telecommunications market sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He spoke on
Cofetel’s challenges to promote, regulate and enforce competition in the Mexican telecom market.
Mexico enacted a
Federal Telecommunications Act in June 1995. According to Lozano, the act has been quite successful.
The
Mexican telecom act allowed for spectrum auctions, which began in 1996. This policy has led to an increase in wireless
subscribers in a variety of sectors. For example, cellular subscribership has increased by 90 percent to 3.3 million users
by the end of 1998. This is equivalent to 3.4 cellular phones for every 100 inhabitants, Lozano said.
Not everyone is
happy with the spectrum policy Mexico has implemented. During a panel following Lozano’s speech, a representative
of Telmex, the once-government-owned telephone company, complained competitors that purchased wireless licenses
are being allowed to build out their systems but Telmex must wait for two years.
Telmex’s delay did not concern
Del Valle. Telmex controls 60 percent of the cellular market, he said. This was made possible because Telmex was
privatized as a nationwide block instead of by geographic region or line of business, he said. Other countries, such as
Brazil, have not made this “mistake” by privatizing its wireless business by geographic region.
Another
victory for the telecom act-one of great importance to Mexican consumers-is the reduction in the length of time it takes
to get a telephone line. It used to take more than two years for a telephone line to be connected in Mexico, but the wait
is now down to less than a month, said Lozano.
Unlike the United States, the number of both wireline and wireless
lines measures teledensity in Mexico. This difference led Lozano to predict that Mexico’s teledensity will double within
the next five years.
This growth would be substantial to the average Mexican citizen because the number of phone
lines in Mexico City reach only 25 percent of the population compared with only 3 percent in Chiapas.
