SAO PAULO, Brazil-Anatel, Brazil’s regulatory authority, released the official PCS licensing guidelines, making few changes from the text that had been submitted for public consultation last month.
Anatel also postponed the sale of the licenses until January 2001. The licenses were scheduled to be auctioned by the end of the year.
In addition, Anatel said some mobile-phone carriers can merge as soon as October, ahead of the PCS license sale. The regulator said cellular companies will be able to expand outside their current areas of service as long as they remain within three main concession areas.
In the guidelines, Anatel said the country’s geographic coverage areas will have the same dimension of the current areas in which operators offer service.
“The idea of the guidelines is to have a small number of areas of registration (coverage) on the order of 70 and, mainly, coinciding with the numbering areas,” explained counselor Jose Leite Pereira Filho, when announcing the new PCS guidelines.
The decision thwarts the proposal of the incumbent cellular operators, which wanted the coverage areas to include an entire state or even a larger area.
“This would be impeding the consumer of choosing the carrier of long distance,” the counselor said.
Additional details regarding the regulation are scheduled to be presented soon.
With that decision, the state of Sao Paulo will have nine service areas. Currently, wireless callers from outside Sao Paulo to a wireless user in Sao Paulo must connect through BCP, which is the only carrier that offers service in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area. Under the new regulations, callers to Sao Paulo can use another carrier, if they prefer.
In addition, Anatel is studying the issue of charging users making a call to Diadema, a city within the Sao Paulo metropolitan area, the same rate as making a call to Sao Paulo itself. Currently, a call to a surrounding Sao Paulo city is charged a higher tariff, even though the entire area is served by BCP.
Incumbent mobile carriers had asked for an additional 5 megahertz of spectrum in the 1.9 GHz band for offering third-generation (3G) services, and Anatel denied this proposal.
