The mobile ecosystem has celebrated Plenary Meeting # 41, GSMA Latin America’s key regional meeting with more than 420 attendees. The event, hosted by Antel, took place in Montevideo, Uruguay and has been attended by senior executives from more than 35 Latin American mobile operators, industry suppliers and experts from 30 countries.
The plenary was opened by the Director of GSMA Latin America, Sebastián Cabello, who highlighted the impressive mobile growth in the region: “Globally, the GSMA aims to connect an extra billion people to mobile internet by 2020, to mobilize all things and further customize mobile services. Latin America has over 709 million mobile connections and more than 235 million mobile broadband connections, at the end of the first quarter of 2014. By 2017 the region is expected to reach 500 million mobile broadband connections and 84 million Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connections”.
Antel’s President, Carolina Cosse, attended the plenary meeting and stressed that the event was carried out in a “very symbolic year” for Antel, which celebrates its 40th anniversary, the 20th anniversary of mobile telephony, and the 10th anniversary of GSM services in Uruguay. Cosse said that these meetings are “a tool” to know from the experiences of other operators and “create new forms of business.” “The progress of deployed infrastructure leads us to further develop better quality telecommunications business at the national level,” said the president of Antel.
The president of Uruguay, José Mujica, sent greetings and conveyed his best wishes for the meeting via an official letter, which was ratified by the Secretary of the Presidency of the Republic, Dr. Homero Guerrero, present at the opening.
The main plenary session’s panel was focused on innovation and the future of mobile communications and was attended by Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer of the GSMA, Hector Marin, Senior Director of Business Development at Qualcomm, Rhode Jesper Andersen, Head of Marketing for Ericsson Latin America, and Andrew Maz, CEO of Cisco Advanced Technology Policy.
The event began on Tuesday, 27 with a full day of seminar-workshops on topics such as spectrum and future mobile networks, infrastructure deployment and electromagnetic fields, mobile identity solutions, Roaming LTE, machine-to-machine connections (M2M) and the use of mobile technology for the development of the population, among others.
During the regional meeting, two reports were presented. One titled “Status of AWS in the Americas” highlights the economic impact of allocating Advanced Wireless Services band (1700/2100MHz) spectrum for 4G Mobile Broadband in Latin America. The other one, titled “eWaste in Latin America“, reviews the initiatives of e-waste management undertaken by mobile operators in the region.
To conclude the Plennary #41 there were four sessions workgroups GSMA Latin America (REGU, BARG, SEGF and TECT) and the LatAm CROG’s meeting, assisted by senior representatives of public policies of larger groups of operators in Latin America and the Caribbean.