sábado, marzo 20, 2010

Televisa, Mega and Telefónica will go after CFE’s fiber

There were achieved the speculations on the possible formation of an alliance for CFE’s dark fiber.

Televisa, Telefónica and Megacable announced they will go together to CFE’s dark fiber bidding, which represents the second largest telecommunications network in the country, only behind the one belonging to Telmex.

Those three companies informed in a statement they will participate as a consortium in the bidding and that the definitive formation of this is subject to a successful result. The shareholder’s structure of the consortium will be divided in three equal parts for the three companies.

“This new fiber optic network will represent for Televisa, Telefónica and Megacable an access option to data transfer, generating a higher competence in telecommunications market in Mexico, and therefore, an improve in the quality of offered services”, explained the companies in a statement.

The government plan will be to rent a pair of dark fiber wires to CFE for the interurban transport of data during 20 years that will be extendable for 10 years, and the 295 segments will cover three routes: Pacific, Center and Gulf.

The Ministry of Communications and Transport (SCT) expects to collect at least 858.6 million pesos (mp) for the three bidding segments, estimated that 10 million persons will be benefit from this coverage.

It will be the second largest fiber optic in the country with 21,208 kilometers (km), much smaller than the Telmex one with 107,000 km, but higher than Axtel of Televisa that had 7,700 km and 8,000 km, respectively.

With this bidding, fixed telephony operators will soon have an alternate route to Telmex network in order to transmit voice, data and video, which will decrease down to 40% their expenses for the use of this infrastructure.

Many specialists consider the bidding represents a direct impact for Telmex. IXE Bank reported that dark fiber bidding would make possible the entrance of a new competitor to this sector, while Santander assured that any potential impact after CFE’s dark fiber trend will be negative for Telmex because it would loss incomes by operator’s interconnection.

On the contrary, an anonymous analyst specialized in telecommunications, considered that the impact against Telmex will be minimal due to the incomes the company receives for the network rent to other fixed telephony companies which represents the 5% and 10% of turnovers for interconnection, during the third quarter 2009 sum incomes for 4,201 bp.

THE THREE ROUTES

Pacific: Goes from Baja California to Oaxaca, it includes non connected routes with the rest of the country, in Baja California Norte and Baja California Sur. It has a length of 5,045 mi and a price of 358.1 mp.

Center: Crosses the country from north to south since the center, goes from Chihuahua to Chiapas and will have access to Guatemala from Tapachula. It has a length of 5,000 km and a price of 255.3 mp.

Gulf: Will pass through the west with two exits at the north frontier from Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas to Yucatan, and will have an exit to the underwater wire connected to Florida, has a length of 5,560 km and an initial cost of 245.2 mp. (El Semanario Agencia, ESA)

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