2020 passed without pain or glory in terms of spectrum assignments in Argentina. The year had no news for the industry, which is awaiting definitions of the SubTIC and Enacom in a promised "multi-year spectrum plan." It was announced for the first half of 2021 and will also include the results of the public consultation on Wifi 6, launched in mid-December; an analysis of the frequency reservation for vertical markets; and on TV White Spaces.
Mobile operators are defining strategies in the face of 5G, without urgency and awaiting resolution of several pending regulatory issues. It is worth remembering that Telecom had to return the 40 Mhz that exceeded its cap last June, but the stop associated with Covid-19 left deadlines on hold. To this is added the regulation of DNU 690, which opened a framework of historical uncertainty in the ICT sector.
This scenario makes a massive deployment of 5G unlikely before 2022, or even 2023. According to GSMA projections, the fifth generation will represent 7% of mobile accesses in Argentina by 2025, behind Brazil (18%), Mexico (12%) and Chile (8%).
Doubts about use cases and sustainable business models for 5G in Argentina also contribute to this “waiting period”. In the future testing horizon Claro promises a trial by Nokia for February and March 2021 although the equipment availability obstacle must first be overcome.
The certainties during 2020 came from the field of IoT. Lastly, mobile operators turned to Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) and Cat-M1, with which they seek to compete in the market for technologies for unlicensed use (see separate graph). These latest implementations, especially in LoRa, took advantage of the delay of traditional providers to attract business in the country, so it is now urgent that operators build differentiating offers and that they enforce the safety and efficiency of batteries on models based on mobile technologies - the two bastions of NB-IoT- to expand is in Smart Cities and public services, the vertical ones with broader potential access bases to absorb.
The adoption of NB-IoT in Argentina is still low - less than 5% of IoT accesses - because it requires a strong work in these links of the chain to face the transition from M2M in 2G or 3G to new standards and protocols. Investment in NB-IoT devices is also necessary, which although in the long term are more profitable due to the longer battery life (5 to 10 years), they constitute an initial barrier to entry. NB-IoT is intended for devices in fixed sites, while Cat-M1 or LTE-M targets moving assets, for example, to obtain their position.
Movistar was a pioneer in Argentina with the implementation of NB-IoT and Cat-M1 in 2019. It was initially made available at the AMBA, but currently it is offered throughout the country. As Hernán Blanco, head of Product Development and B2B Services at Movistar Negocios, told Convergencia, they are committed to creating an ecosystem and streamlining a complex value chain that is very different from the massive mobile business: it is made up of chip manufacturers, integrators (module developers) and suppliers (turn the module into a measuring, positioning device, etc.).
In that generation of an ecosystem, the Telefónica subsidiary will make use of Wayra's ventures, to promote that any development is born with NB-IoT. At the end of 2020, it also closed a contract with a local energy company, which will deploy a large number of NB-IoT SIMs for meters. This project will serve as a spearhead for Movistar on the new technology in public services.
Claro deployed its NB-IoT network mainly over 700 Mhz and the start of commercial operations took place in mid-August 2020, nationwide. The operator's plan to venture into this technology had been delayed due to the difficulty of detecting a business case: Lastly, the need for efficient use of bandwidth and autonomy of devices with a longer battery life, two aspects that can only be covered with specific networks for IoT such as NB.
This is precisely what Marcelo Guglielmucci, Business Market Marketing and Planning Manager at Claro, highlighted in a talk with Convergencia: “It is the first mobile network designed for IoT. Those of 2G and 3G are useful, but NB-IoT is designed for businesses of this type, which until now were not done efficiently, mainly due to the optimization of the batteries. With this we get into Low Power networks, a market that used to be on unlicensed spectrum”.
Claro's offer is based on a Networks as a service model, in which the customer pays per connected device. In 2020, the América Móvil subsidiary managed to turn on Cat-M1 in 50% of the national territory, but by the beginning of 2021 it will be deployed nationwide.
Telecom also worked during 2020 on the start-up of NB-IoT and Cat-M1: in its case, the offer is leveraged on the Nokia Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) platform, 100% virtualized and offered as a managed service. Fernando Freytes, director of IoT, explained that the greatest need of customers is to simplify the complexity of providers for IoT solutions: that is why Telecom seeks to occupy that space, as an end-to-end integrator, and not only do it Argentina but also in the rest of the region.
From WING middleware, Telecom has created last year - since the creation of the IoT section, with about 40 people, in September 2019 - platforms for verticals from the development of software and control panels: smart home, tracking, telemetry, Smart Cities and health are some of these verticals. In concrete terms in the product portfolio on WING this will translate in the coming months into an asset monitor on NB-IoT, a temperature monitoring device and a medical management solution.
This article was published in the 2020 Communications Atlas and Yearbook on Convergencia’s 25th anniversary.