CAF makes loan to Mexico's Red Compartida

Latin American multilateral development bank CAF announced that it loaned US$50mn to Mexican telecommunications company Altán Redes, the operator of the Red Compartida wholesale wireless network, to help it deploy its services.

CAF did not specify the terms of the loan.

The Red Compartida "contributes on the one side to the democratization and access to telecommunications services and on the other, to have an impact on the promotion of more competition and service offers," said CAF's Mexican representative Emilio Uquillas.

The Red Compartida is a public-private partnership using 90MHz of bandwidth in the 700MHz spectrum, as well as strands of high-capacity fiber optics belonging to state-owned power utility CFE to provide fast wireless connectivity to 92.2% of Mexico's population. The network is designed as a wholesale provider, meaning it offers capacity to current and new telecommunications service providers.

At the time of its launch in March, the company covered 32.2% of the country or around 36.1mn Mexicans.

The US$7bn project has been attracting interest from both new and established players in the market in recent months, with at least 13 companies signing up with Altán as of early September, including four subsidiaries of Mexico's largest media company and triple-play provider Televisa, the local unit of Telefónica and satellite TV provider Dish Mexico.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), announced in August that it had reached an agreement with Mexican investment promotion agency Promtel, the government partner in the Red Compartida, to monitor the project's impact in the local telecoms market as part of a conditional credit line.