Costa Rica Publishes Tender Documents for New Mobile Licenses
September 2nd, 2010 | by admin |Costa Rica’s telecoms regulator, Sutel has published the bidding rules for the tender to operate one of up to three mobile phone networks. The move will break the monopoly held by the state-owned Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE).
Interested bidders are required to have a minimum customer base of 1.8 million customers, have revenues over US$450 million dollars outside of Costa Rica and have been operating for over five years at least in one country. A minimum fee of US$70 million will apply for the license and operators will have to launch services by September 2011.
Sutel says that five companies – Cable&Wireless, Telef�nica, Claro, Digicel and Millicom – have requested the documents and are said to be serious about bidding. Six other companies are said to have requested the tender documents but are not considered serious contenders and may have been requesting the documents for informational purposes.
The other companies include Ericsson and Alcatel Lucent, as well as a couple of local law firms – and the incumbent operator.
The government was obliged to open up the market to competition as a condition of entry into the Central American Free-Trade Agreement.
