E. Jay Saunders, CEO of Digicel TCI returned home late last week from the LTE Latin America 2012 Conference, which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 17-18 April 2012. At the conference, E. Jay spoke on the topic of “Leveraging the Need for Internet Connection: How are operators preparing their customers to want all the traffic growth that LTE will bring” and he was also part of a CEO Panel discussing the topic “How Will the Operator Business Model Be Transformed with the Introduction of LTE.”
During his presentation, E. Jay stated that since Latin American operators are not constrained by the same issues facing USA operators they are better positioned to financially benefit from LTE. E. Jay highlighted this fact with examples of value added services with high customer experience levels that Latin American and Caribbean operators can roll out in conjunction with LTE that will generate new revenue streams and greater ARPU’s – a win win situation for both the operator and the customer. According to E. Jay, when it comes to LTE, business model innovation is going to be critically important due to its large capital requirements, with some USA operators expecting to spend up to US$20 billion dollars to rollout their LTE services.
“At LTE Latin America 2012 in Brazil, E. Jay Saunders gave an insightful speech, raising important issues regarding the new technology. Regulators should be more opened to discuss the excellent points raised by Saunders.” stated Marceli Passoni, research analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, the company that hosted the conference. Informa estimates that in 2016 LTE will account for 42 million users in Latin America, representing 5% of total subscribers. According to Informa, “LTE is the next mobile change-out which will enable mobile operators to better and more cost-effectively transport the rapidly growing data traffic on their networks. LTE will help Latin American operators to deliver new applications and value-added services, boosting data revenues.”
E. Jay, who is scheduled to speak next at the LTE World Summit 2012 being held in Barcelona, Spain at the end of May, stated that “…there are companies that are currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and in some cases billions of dollars to rollout LTE, and they are not going to make back their investments with the old voice centric business models. With data traffic growing at a faster rate than voice traffic, operators are now experiencing higher costs to support mobile data than the revenues that they are making from it. This trend is not sustainable, and the only way they can reverse it is by innovating on the business model side.”
Some of the other speakers at the 2 day conference were:
Ajay Joseph, CTO, iBasis;
Anderson André, Latin America Service Provider Director, CISCO Systems;
Chris King Sr, Director, Oracle;
Daniel Borras, Director Business Development, Samsung;
Daniel Locklear, Sr. Director Business Development, Alcatel-Lucent;
Emmanuel Coelho Alves, Wireless Product Line Senior Manager, Huawei;
Hanna Maurer Sibley, Product Manager LTE, ERICSSON, Sweden;
Philippe Leon, Worldwide OSS Director, HP;
José Geraldo de Marco, Latin America Technical Marketing, MOTOROLA MOBILITY;
Marcelo Gonçalves, Portfolio Planning Manager Latam, NOKIA MOBILE.
