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The News caught up with Purificacion Carpinteyro last week, and it wasn’t easy: the lady is a dynamo. Director of the National Electronics Industry and Electrical Communications Chamber’s Section 10 (for Electrical Communications Network Operators) and strategist for IUSACELL, Lic. Carpinteyro is in constant motion. Nonetheless, she brought your columnist along for a whirlwind tour of the Information Age that’s coming to Mexico, and essentially confirmed what George Gilder’s been saying about the technological possibilities. According to Carpinteyro, Section 10 is more about continuous advances in the information business than the particular technologies that deliver the information.
Still, she notes that new digital wireless technologies will offer both rising capacities for those who can already apply advancing productivity tools -- a population that ought to increase over time -- and declining costs for those who are just entering the digital age. Generation by technological generation, new equipment will offer better services to the clients of Section 10’s operators. And, as Carpinteyro points out, the handsets are getting so smart that they themselves will soon teach new users step-by-step how to operate all their features -- even if those users can’t program a VCR.
Lic. Carpinteyro agrees with telecommunications columnist Arturo D’Arbel that Mexico’s youth are the individuals most likely to take full advantage of this new technology stream, since the young naturally absorb the information in the environment around them. Computer languages are like any other language in that sense: children have a window of opportunity when they soak up new grammars and vocabularies like a sponge, and the more you immerse them in new languages, the more they learn. Bringing Internet to Mexico’s schoolchildren will create a new nation that finds writing HTML and Java as natural as speaking Spanish.
With visionary private sector leaders like Lic. Carpinteyro, Mexico could well position itself for the digital age before other nations do. The nation has spectrum in abundance, and could ensure high performance in its schoolchildren’s personal digital assistants by substituting bandwidth for transistors. Working with advanced base-station and handset manufacturers like Tellabs and Motorola, bright operators from Section 10 could advise agencies like the SCT, Cofetel, and SEP on how Mexico could quickly make the adaptive jump from the Industrial-Age learning curve that Telmex and its union have traditionally climbed to the Digital-Age learning curve that’s now sweeping the world. There’s no reason to think that those agencies would reject an opportunity to help lead Mexico and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world in creating a new infrastructure to digitally educate what may be the world’s largest youth population speaking a single language and dialect.
Speaking of youth and Internet, D’Arbel reports that Telmex’s recent tariff increases in 64K and 1MB lines forced organizations like the SEP’s Infotec and National Technological Network to cut planned growth in Internet connections between 50% and 70% in 1997. Telmex explained their rate increases by noting that they hadn’t raised tariffs for several years -- which makes the huge price jump sound reasonable until you recall that operators all around the world have been cutting rates for these high-speed connections. Telecoms columnist Jorge Borrego wrote that the this price increase has the user community up in arms.
At the same time, Borrego reports that Cofetel has taken a hands-off attitude towards Telmex for fear of upsetting the Internet market with a hasty decision. This position is intellectually respectable, provided Cofetel is willing to hand out licenses quickly to let competition determine the market tariffs. Borrego says the major Internet users and access providers are talking about building their own high-speed backbone, since they think Telmex’s rates are far higher than their costs. If that’s the case, Cofetel could launch a competitive market almost instantly by combining easy access to operating licenses with a ruling that Telmex can’t cut their rates for at least a year. The business response to those announcements would tell us whether costs really justified Telmex’s rate increases.
This week The News will scout out all the smart telephones (or cellular laptops) at Latinet/E.J. Krause’s COMDEX ‘97 show. Polaroid’s CEO will show off their new digital cameras there -- tools that will soon be nearly indispensable for Mexican page builders on the Internet’s World Wide Web.
Readers with questions or comments for Dr. White can call
011(525)595-6045, fax 011(525)683-5874, or email
white@profmexis.sar.net
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