AT&T Exits the Mexico: Can the New Owners Compete?

Yesterday, AT&T announced that reached an agreement to sell their Mexico network, subscribers and spectrum to Grupo Televisa and Fintech Holdings.  This new group will be competing against the market incumbent, Telcel.

One of the most pertinent questions is whether Grupo Televisa and Fintech have the spectrum necessary to compete with Telcel.

Going to our Web Spectrum Viewer we will evaluate a couple of national views of Mexican spectrum.

Licensed Population:

Licensed Population highlights how much of Mexico's population can be served on the newly acquired spectrum.  This view is broken down by band classifications show what you can reach with low band spectrum (coverage), lower mid band spectrum (4G services), and upper mid band spectrum (5G).  The current census population of Mexico is 126 Million, to the lower and upper mid bands will cover the entire population but they are unable to cover almost 10 Million people with lower band spectrum.

Reach out to us if you are interest in seeing the low band geographic limits.

The ability to cover all of the potential customers is the first important test and the second important evaluation is how much spectrum do I have to provide high speed capacity services?

Our National Spectrum Depth output shows the spectrum holdings for AT&T, Telcel, and the available spectrum from their regulatory agency.  AT&T's spectrum portfolio is very similar to Telcel's with AT&T having more upper mid band spectrum and Telcel having more lower mid band.

We are including a chart for the US major carriers to visualize whether the Mexican carriers may face limitations to the types of services or customers because of the relatively low spectrum holdings be each carrier.

In the US, the lowest national average of spectrum for one of the major carriers is nearly 300MHz.  In Mexico, each carrier has roughly 240MHz of spectum.