Operadora Protel SA

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Operadora Protel SA, formerly known as Investcom, was awarded a concession to operate as a national and international long distance carrier in April 1996. Investcom was one of the eight companies that obtained a concession to operate as a long distance carrier between 1995 and 1996. Such licenses were issued as part of Mexican liberalization of its telecommunications market. Investcom was a consortium owned by Nextel and Grupo San Luis. Investcom's project consisted of building a 8,900 km fiber cable in Mexico to provide its long distance services. The total project cost was estimated in US$ 398 million, according to Comision Federal de Telecomunicaciones (Cofetel), the Mexican regulatory agency for telecommunications. The first phase of this project was operation by end 1996. The company invested in expanding its long distance telephone network in 65 cities in 1998. In 2002 the company selected Marconi plc to provide an optical backbone network based on dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology to support a nationwide network in Mexico. As of 2003, Protel had 130,000 fixed lines in service. In 2005, Lucent Technologies upgraded Protel i-Nexts IP/MPLS backbone with Juniper Networks M-series routing platforms. It was not possible to find the % ownership of the Sponsors (2005). limited information about the project past 2005. In 2003, Protel had 101137 customers. Investments reported in 2005 correspond to plans of the company (February of 2005); client access equipment will cost US$5mn and US$3mn will go towards increasing Protel's IP capacity.