Mexico seeks bids for nationwide 700 MHz wholesale LTE network to serve competitive market, public safety
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- Mexico seeks bids for nationwide 700 MHz wholesale LTE network to serve competitive market, public safety
- Mexico seeks bids for nationwide 700 MHz wholesale LTE network to serve competitive market, public safety
- Mexico seeks bids for nationwide 700 MHz wholesale LTE network to serve competitive market, public safety
Mexico seeks bids for nationwide 700 MHz wholesale LTE network to serve competitive market, public safety
Governments in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean have designated the 20 MHz of Band 14 spectrum in the 700 MHz frequencies for public-safety LTE systems. Mexico’s rules for Red Compartida do not include any special stipulation for Band 14, although the Band 14 airwaves are part of the Mexico wholesale initiatives.
When asked whether Rivada Networks would try to align Mexico’s public-safety users with other Band 14 first responders in the Western Hemisphere if it wins the Red Compartida bid, Ganley said, “We will take advantage of all of the economies of scale that present themselves—let me answer it that way.”
Bids for the Red Compartida project are due on Aug. 8. The Mexican government plans to announce its winning selection on Aug. 24 and sign a contract with the partner by Nov. 8. Operations on the wholesale network are expected to begin by the first quarter of 2018, and the system’s coverage target is slated to be reached no later than 2023, according to the Motorola Solutions slide presentation.
Minimum data rates from each terminal within the Red Compartida coverage area are 1 MB/s for uplink transmissions and 4 MB/s for downlink transmissions, according to tender document.
No subleasing of the 90 MHz of spectrum is allowed. In addition, incumbent communications providers in Mexico—for example, dominant communications giant America Movil, Telefonica SA and AT&T, which last yaer spent $4.4 billion to buy two Mexican mobile operators—are not eligible to bid for the right to build Red Compartida, but they will be allowed to bid on the network’s bandwidth capacity on the open market.
“Incumbents very logically are excluded from bidding in Mexico,” Ganley said. “Although they can’t respond and run the wholesale market, they can access the bandwidth. They will do that through the open-access-market mechanism, meaning that nobody gets special treatment—there are no pre-picked winners. The open-access market is where they go in and compete for that resource, because obviously competition is the best way to ensure that value is gained for access to that bandwidth resource.”