10. During the privatization process, was there ever a possibility to sell a division of the company, to sell a segmented network?
I believe that the worst scheme was the American, which at the end was carried out by Brazil. The American scheme was the AT&T monopoly. It was divided into eight or nine regional monopolies; then several small monopolies were created from the big monopoly.
In the case of Mexico, they did not consider mobile telephony. Today Telmex has less than 25 per cent of the lines. We will go into that later, less than 25 per cent of the total lines in Mexico and less than one third of total revenues in the sector.
Any way, I believe that a complete competition model could probably have been better. I believe they should have created three or four companies in the United States, because it is a very big market.
When Telmex was privatized, only the long distance service remained as an exclusive service, local service stayed open to mobile competition.
Actually the competitor was the mobile monopoly. The competitor started in 88, before Telcel started. The complete service model showed that it was the best, as has been proven by its return to consolidation in the United States, to be a full service national or regional company.
The following should have been done. Allow the cable companies to start to compete from the onset. They took too long; the cable companies are more than 40 years old. Then, I would say that they are better than the American model; and the American model is regionally reintegrating again . Before it was only local service, today it is long distance and mobile; they are already into convergence because previously there was no triple play and cable companies historically lagged behind too long with services, they should have started before, there and here.
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