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Telefonica claims Brazil will have 5G after 2022; focuses on refarming 1.8 GHz

by Roberta Prescott
written by Roberta Prescott Share
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SÃO PAULO – According to Vivo CEO Amos Genish, “5G” won’t happen in Brazil before 2022, and is not a priority for the Brazilian telecom operator – and Telefonica subsidiary – at the moment.

“Globally, 5G is still under standard definition and it won’t be a reality before 2020,” Genish said during a press conference at this week’s Futurecom 2016 event. “Concerning Brazil, the country will take at least two years after that to begin 5G deployments. We have other issues to address before that.”

Genish said Vivo is focusing its investments on improving the quality of its broadband, with fiber deployments, “4G” deployments and on refarming part of its spectrum band in the 1.8 GHz band in support of LTE. Vivo said it has already refarmed five megahertz of spectrum, but didn’t say how much more it planned to cull from its 2G and 3G services moving forward. In addition, Vivo is working with carrier aggregation to deploy LTE-Advanced, and also is looking at radio access network sharing and at eventually decommissioning legacy technologies.

Wide connectivity, with high-speed broadband and more 4G services, are the base of telco’s future. While it designs its “internet of things” strategy, Vivo is looking beyond just being the provider of the connectivity.

“We are having conversations to build our ‘internet of things’ business model, as providing SIM cards to machine-to-machine generates low profitability,” Genish explained. “We are in the competition to become the provider for car connectivity to one of the largest Latin American vehicle manufacturers,” though he declined to name the company.

Vivo has seen voice revenue drop 22% between 2011 and 2015, which has led the carrier to attempt a transformation to become a digital service provider. The strategy is to use big data and analytics tools to better understand customers and be able to personalize offerings as well as new services and products. Beyond that, Vivo is looking to compete with Google and Facebook on advertising.

“No one knows our customers better than we do,” Genish added.

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Editor, [email protected] Roberta Prescott is responsible for Latin America reporting news and analysis, interviewing key stakeholders. Roberta has worked as an IT and telecommunication journalist since March 2005, when she started as a reporter with InformationWeek Brasil magazine and its website IT Web. In July 2006, Prescott was promoted to be the editor-in-chief, and, beyond the magazine and website, was in charge for all ICT products, such as IT events and CIO awards. In mid-2010, she was promoted to the position of executive editor, with responsibility for all the editorial products and content of IT Mídia. Prescott has worked as a journalist since 1998 and has three journalism prizes. In 2009, she won, along with InformationWeek Brasil team, the press prize 11th Prêmio Imprensa Embratel. In 2008, she won the 7th Unisys Journalism Prize and in 2006 was the editor-in-chief when InformationWeek Brasil won the 20th media award Prêmio Veículos de Comunicação. She graduated in Journalism by the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas, has done specialization in journalism at the Universidad de Navarra (Spain, 2003) and Master in Journalism at IICS – Universidad de Navarra (Brazil, 2010) and MBA – Executive Education at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

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