In the closing of the regional event “WiMax Latin America 2006”, organized by the Grupo Convergencia, that ended last Friday in Buenos Aires, Telmex and Telefónica agreed on pointing out WiMax as a technology complementary to the networks they own. However, both companies’ strategies are not alike for each country, whether they are incumbent or incoming markets. Carlos Uzal, manager of Engineering and Radio and Infrastructure Works, and vice-president of Telefónica’s Network, stated that WiMax is a technological complement in the way towards broadband overcrowding. The executive rejected world's providers and niche operators' attitude, which, in the previous session day, had said that the carriers are not making great efforts. However, he said that Telefónica’s idea is to wait for interoperability to develop so costs fall.

Telefónica currently has 410 thousand ADSL customers and a market share of 98% in Peru; 420 thousand connections and 46% market share in Chile, and 480 thousand accesses and a market share for 35% in Argentina. For Carlos Uzal, upon ADSLs deployment is comprehensible that Telefónica expects the incoming operators to give the first steps. Anyway, Telefónica’s executive stated that “WiMax is an excellent technology to enable the entry in rural areas", and he said that there are still problems for its use in the cities:  "penetration inside some building is still difficult. Moreover, so as to think of WiMax for the residential market, a CPE and Network elements cost reduction is needed.

On the other hand, Alejandro Dario Pérez, Telmex Argentina’s WiMax platform, said that the company is still providing commodities with the purpose of migrating to MultiService Private Networks, and it, then expects to offer Administrative Networks. Pérez considered WiMax “as an opportunity to directly reach the customers in the markets where we are not incumbents”. Only in Mexico, Telmex is incumbent, mainly the only market, like in Morocco, where Telefónica started to offer WiMax commercially. Telmex Argentina executive said that in Latin America they expect to have greater capillarity to address small and medium-sized companies' market with own infrastructure, while in Mexico, they only expect to make use of WiMax to replace copper in areas where there is no deployed infrastructure. Telmex, that is the operator with greater amount of spectrum in Latin America in the 3.5 Ghz band, commercially offers fixed WiMax in Argentina and Brazil.

As regards, mobile WiMax’s implementation (802.16 "e"), both companies argued that before it is necessary to have "WiMax’s environment”, as regards better capacity, spectrum efficiency, better costs, new applications, subscribers' handsets, etc. Telefónica said that its interest in WiMax is, not due to mobility features, but because WiMax will enable a reduction in handsets’ costs and a networks’ exploitation. Moreover, Telmex believes the mobile system will allow a joint offer of telephony, data and mobile broadband in the urban centers, Both companies believe that WiMax and UMTS coexistence will be necessary.