Movistar will migrate 100% of its traffic to AT&T in Mexico in June this year


Merida.- Telefonica Mexico points out that it will be in November when it will begin to generate financial savings continuously due to the infrastructure sharing agreement that it signed in 2019 with AT&T to migrate the traffic of its approximately 25 million users to that company’s cellular network in the stretch of last Mille; that is, in the communication stage that goes from the base station to the user, while Movistar it still manages the brain and other elements of its entire network.

In November 2019, Movistar and AT&T They agreed to migrate traffic to network sharing to generate efficiencies in infrastructure management and coverage availability. 4G-LTE and superior technologies throughout the country.

The agreement does not mean that Movistar would become a virtual mobile operator of AT&T in Mexico in the futuregiven that its parent company Telefónica said that it would continue with its infrastructure deployments, services and because it would maintain direct control of its traffic, in addition to continuing its own wholesale network agreements with virtual mobile operators and would also continue with its deals with Telcel regarding national roaming agreements.

This deal would allow Movistar to achieve annual savings of 230 million euros or 5,060 million pesos after 2022 due to expensive network deployments, but above all due to the return of radioelectric bands that it later made to the State and whose payment of rights for Spectrum use meant a significant burden on the financial statements of this company.

Contrarily, this agreement caused Spica Telecom take legal action against Movistar considering that this return of spectrum could leave it without the input for its own service coverage.

The operator Spica Telecom asked the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) to review the agreement between AT&T and Telefónica on the shared use of networks in the last mile section, because in its opinion that agreement would affect the interests of third-party companies that buy wholesale service capacity or that are partners of Telefónica in the rural franchise niche.

For AT&T, the agreement meant a new income that tried to compensate for the drops in flow due to the loss of users that it faced in that year and to add traffic to its recently launched 4G network with a national reach.

“We are going online to fully achieve them (the savings) in October… We announced it in November 2019, so, more approximately, next November we will achieve it, those savings,” he said. Camilo Aya Caro, CEO of Telefónica Mexico during the Canieti National Convention 2022.

The savings of 230 million euros that Telefónica forecasts for after 2022 mean almost a quarter of the revenue of 1,010 million euros that Movistar billed in Mexico in the 2021 financial year.

At the beginning of April, the company would already be migrating 80% of its users’ traffic to the AT&T network and by the end of the year, it would also have returned to the State those spectrum frequencies that no longer make sense for its business, for example batches in the 2.5 and 1.9 GHz bands.

“Migration is going faster: we already passed 80% in April, starting; right now there we are. In April we are still going to do a lot, in May another little and in June very little, because everything will already be done”, said Camilo Aya.



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