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

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January 9, 2003

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Today's News Past Week Past 30 Days Past 90 Days Past Year Since 1996

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.

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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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