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No More GSM Lines For The Time
Being
That's it, they are all gone,
the GSM cellular lines that is.
In just 11 months, all 600.000
lines of the "new" GSM network
installed by the Ericsson
company were sold out as of
yesterday afternoon, a couple of
weeks ahead of what the
Instituto Costarricense de
Electricidad (ICE) - the state
monopoly on telecommunications -
had anticipated.
ICE still has a small amount of
the older TMDA technology and it
will be some time before any
more GSM lines will be offered
for sale, other than the
sporadic announcement of lines
coming back to the institution
of customers fail to pay their
bills.
The new lines were offered to
customers last December after a
two year setback following
charges of corruption and
payoffs.
ICE is now studying various
options. One option is to seek a
legal way to expand the
contracts of the two existing
cellular suppliers, Alcatel and
Ericsson, which could see as
many as 500.000 lines added to
the network within months. The
other option is to begin a
bidding process for a new
contract, a process that can
take as long as two years, as
indicated by the past.
Currently there are 600.000
customers of the "new" GSM
service installed by Ericsson,
400.000 of the "old" GSM network
installed by Alcatel, and
544.000 TDMA lines, known as the
old technology. In total, there
are 1.544.000 cellular customers
in Costa Rica.
No one can say why this
situation has occurred other
than to say that ICE did not
properly forecast the demand for
cellular service.
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