Friday, November 7, 2014

AT&T to Buy Mexico's Iusacell

We thought AT&T was going to pick up a few pieces of the TelCel network that will be cast off to comply with future Mexico regulations..but no.  AT&T has decided to jump into the Mexico market with both feet and buy the existing Iusacell network.  This should create quite a shakeup in the Mexico wireless landscape and maybe even more so for Americas who use wireless when traveling south of the border.

AT&T currently has a favorable roaming agreement with TelCel, which we feel is the best network in Mexico.  That may change relatively soon.  Since Iusacell is the least developed of the top 3 Mexico cellular networks we expect AT&T to make a significant investment in bringing the technology up to fairly high standards, probably right up to 4G LTE.  This should mean better coverage and better deals for AT&T, and possibly Cricket, customers to roam in Mexico, and a potentially worse situation for Verizon and Sprint roamers.  Isuacel maintains what little CDMA coverage that is left in Mexico and I can see no good reason for AT&T to further upgrade the CDMA capabilties...maybe even turn it off.  That won't happen soon and there could be a another shoe to drop before all this shakes out.

We'll be watching the unfolding Mexico situation at MexicoCellular.com.