Subject: [NEXTEL-1] So Near Yet So Far: A Cellphone Roamer in Latin Lands

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 03:50:23 -0500

January 9, 2003

So Near Yet So Far: A Cellphone Roamer in Latin Lands

By SIMON ROMERO

     BREEZE of dry tropical heat greeted me after my plane touched down in Brasília, a
futuristic capital of wide avenues and
     sprawling concrete monuments. Then my American cellphone rang. It was my editor
calling from New York with a few
questions.

I later marveled at how easily I was reached by someone dialing a New York phone number.
The crystal-clear quality of the
service I used was delightfully deceptive, Brasília's remoteness notwithstanding.

If only international roaming was always so easy in the developing world. Unfortunately,
judging from my own recent experience,
roaming has a way to go before carriers in the United States and Europe can confidently
market worldwide roaming capabilities
to their customers.

Most large American wireless companies offer some sort of roaming abroad, but only one,
T-Mobile (formerly VoiceStream), a
unit of Deutsche Telekom, has aggressively started to advertise such a service. But the
international roaming offered by carriers
in Europe and much of Asia is more advanced because they adhere to a single wireless
standard, the global system for mobile
communications, or GSM.

The wireless industry in the United States developed differently, with a variety of
standards allowed to compete: code division
multiple access, or CDMA; time division multiple access, or TDMA; Nextel's iDEN and,
increasingly, GSM.

Latin America's wireless industry has been influenced by American carriers that invested
heavily in the region, resulting in a
similar mixture of standards. So when I recently traveled to Mexico and Brazil I took two
phones capable of roaming in both
countries, a TDMA phone from Cingular and an iDEN phone from Nextel.

Both phones worked well in Mexico City, and I was even able to receive a text message each
morning on the Cingular handset
telling me about the weather in Atlanta, where the company is based. Part of the appeal of
bringing a phone from the United
States instead of renting one in Mexico was that my wife and colleagues could easily reach
me by dialing a local phone number.

But when I traveled outside the capital, near Mexico's border with Texas, neither phone
worked. And once I left Brasília, using
the phones in rural areas of Brazil was similarly difficult. Nextel's affiliate in the
country provides service only in large cities like
São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília. So when I traveled to a soybean-growing area in
the interior, the Nextel phone simply
did not work.

The Cingular phone did not function in the countryside either, but even in urban areas I
had a problem: I could receive calls but
could not make them. When I called the local TDMA operator to see what the problem was, I
was told to enter a numeric code
that would allow me to place calls on the phone.

That did not work, so I simply stopped using the phone. But when I thought I could depend
on the Nextel phone, I was proved
wrong. Upon returning to Brasília from my trip to the soybean farms, the phone, to my
dismay, stopped working.

A Nextel spokeswoman later explained that the problem might have had something to do with
a faulty SIM card in the phone.
SIM, which stands for Subscriber Identity Module, is a tiny microchip card about the size
of a fingernail inserted in a mobile
phone that allows subscribers to use a single phone on different carriers' networks.

Some frequent international travelers are well versed in SIM technology and the techniques
used to switch cards, which usually
involves removing a handset's battery pack and tweaking the card with a paper clip until
it pops out. Swapping a phone's SIM
card allows it to work with a different phone number on another carrier's network, so
people who subscribe to wireless calling
plans in different countries sometimes find carrying a couple of SIM cards issued by
different carriers for the same phone easier
than trying to decipher the complexities of international roaming services.

Getting the phones to work may be only part of the problem. Roaming charges in the United
States are puny in comparison with
what users normally pay when roaming abroad; in Latin America, such services often start
at about $1 a minute and can cost
much more. Still, particularly for business customers, they can be an attractive option.

"I find the convenience of being easily in touch with people to be worth it," said Juanita
Gutierrez, a public relations executive in
New York who has taken her American phone on business trips to Latin American countries
like Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.
She also said it was more advantageous to use wireless roaming instead of placing calls
over hotel phones or paying for calls with
credit cards.

Analysts expect roaming to become more common in Latin America - especially in areas
attracting many foreign travelers, like
the Caribbean - as the GSM standard becomes more common there. But for the time being much
of the region remains off the
roaming map, helping to illustrate the sharp contrasts between city and countryside that
still define much of Latin America.

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