Mobile telecommunications: a personal experience

Like all of my generation, I clearly remember the day I bought my first cell phone. It was 1991 and my operator Iusacell. I don’t remember if Telcel was already in the market or about to be. To give Iusacell some advantage, the government forced Telcel (then a subsidiary of Telmex) to start operations a year after Iusacell.

It was amazing for me to be able to make a long distance call and check in with a colleague in New York while driving around the Ring Road. Call quality was superb. I had Iusacell for a couple of years until Telcel’s offer of smaller and more practical equipment convinced me to change operators. At that time there was no portability of the telephone number, so each change of operator had the serious inconvenience that some contacts, who had not been notified about the number change, simply lost the possibility of communicating with you.

Some years later, other companies entered the market, such as Telefónica, Nextel or Unefon. The quality of Iusacell and Telcel continued to be good; and as they developed their networks, Telefónica, Nextel and Unefon offered competition in various cities. Quality was good because cell service was still a luxury. You had to pay as much for the calls you made as for the ones you received. By 1996, Telcel had far surpassed the number of users that Iusacell had. Part of this exponential growth can be explained by the use that Telcel made of the Telmex infrastructure (closed to other operators), but the offer of better equipment in better conditions also had an influence.

In 1998, the Federal Telecommunications Commission (Cofetel) implemented the modality “The caller pays”, so that the recipient of the calls would no longer have to pay for them. This regulatory decision, together with the creation of the prepaid system with recharge cards that were sold even at traffic lights, gave rise to an explosion in the contracting of mobile services. The rapid growth in the user base resulted in the saturation of networks in some cities and a degradation in the quality of services. The impossibility of porting the telephone number became a real barrier to competition.

Given this situation, in 2008 Cofetel implemented the number portability system as a user right. Thus, changing companies no longer implies having to change numbers and lose contacts. Given what I perceived as poor quality on the part of Telcel and after fifteen years, I decided to try the competition and switched to Telefónica. I was with Telefónica for nearly five years and I must say, with sadness, that I noticed a gradual but constant degradation in the quality of the service. After the telecommunications reform and the arrival of AT&T in Mexico, I changed operators again.

The first years the AT&T service was good, but with the absorption of all the clients of Telefónica, which practically became a virtual mobile operator as it was forced to return spectrum due to its exorbitant cost, I noticed a saturation of the network ( at least in Mexico City) and a noticeable decrease in the quality of services.

Thus, after going through practically all the competition, today I find myself back as a Telcel client. Although the preponderance measures implemented by the Federal Telecommunications Institute are correct on paper, the lack of technical and administrative indicators, non-competitive conditions for the use of the preponderant infrastructure, and the null supervision of the authority, maintain an unfavorable regulatory environment. for the competition.

Despite this, we must not forget that technicalities are irrelevant to the user. The only thing that matters when choosing an operator is coverage, quality and price. It is important to have a pro-competition regulation, but it is also important to compete on the street, in the market and in front of the user.

@gsoriag