Today, although Altán Redes markets its services to Virtual Mobile Operators (MVNO)the income it receives is not enough to reach its goal of continuing to deploy infrastructure in remote sites.
“If we had the flexibility to market directly (to end users) we would have an important tool to increase our chances of increasing our income directly,” Lerma said during his participation in the forum Telecommunications for Inclusion: Can connectivity reduce poverty and inequality?
The high costs of deploying infrastructure as well as operating it and the business model with which Red Compartida was designed stalled its goal of having 19 million users on its network. This, added to the lack of income caused the company to decide to enter commercial bankruptcy in 2021.
“The deployment of Social Coverage, the execution of works and maintenance of Red Compartida to provide services has very high costs, which is why the company consumes large amounts of cash monthly,” explained the company in the application document to commercial bankruptcy of which Expansion has a copy.
In January and February of this year, the deployment of infrastructure has been practically stopped, due to the suspension of services by tower companies and data carriers.
In addition, the delay in deployment meant that the launch of a new Virtual Mobile Operator (MVNO) within the Red Compartida had to be postponed “due to the uncertainty about the commercial bankruptcy and the caution of the owners of the operator and its investors to dedicate resources to Altan”.
“The signing of new MVNOs, which translates into income from network integration services, has been slowed down by the caution of the prospects and their investors to dedicate resources to Altán,” the company asserts in the document of which Expansion has a copy.
Carlos Lerma assures that to prevent this situation from happening again, the company will reduce costs to “sustainable levels” and accelerate the deployment of infrastructure so that more Virtual Mobile Operators arrive and so that those who already operate on their infrastructure can increase their coverage.
“Some of the MVNOs that started operations a year or two years ago have started to mature their strategies and some regional ones have started to expand much faster. That is why our strategy is to accelerate commercialization and support these MVNOs to deploy more quickly”, says the manager.
In addition, he commented that with the financing obtained by the company for 388.1 million dollars, of which 161 million dollars were obtained from development banks, they guarantee the viability and balance of the company, in addition to the fact that the payment subsidy will be maintained. of the radio spectrum.