ATLANTA-A consortium led by BellSouth Corp. and Grupo Safra were scheduled to begin offering cellular service today in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Construction on the Time Division Multiple Access network was completed in nine months, said the companies.
The consortium, BCP, held a pre-service lottery to identify the first 150,000 customers and, to date, has received almost 2 million applications, said BellSouth. Of the 150,000 identified via lottery, 110,000 already have signed up for service. The company expects to have capacity to serve 500,000 customers by August.
BellSouth and its partners in BCP won the B-band license in July 1997, paying $2.5 billion. The BCP partnership also owns a license to operate a cellular network in a six-state region in northeast Brazil. Including the license fees for its two areas, BCP already has invested more than $3.5 billion in its Brazilian operations. Working through a banking syndicate, BCP also raised a $1.75 billion loan to fund its operations.
