Despite an enormous amount of growing room left on its Groupe Speciale Mobile network, Telecom Italia Mobile SpA vice-president of strategic marketing, planning and international affairs Mauro Sentinelli acknowledges that the DCS 1800 frequencies he expects to get soon are indispensable to develop the market, for us and for Omnitel. He says For us, these frequencies will serve just to expand capacity in congested areas, not to open a new Groupe Speciale Mobile service. J P Morgan & Co mobile communications analyst Jonathan Adams notes, however, that Telecom Italia Mobile could use the DCS 1800 frequencies to expand into the international Personal Communications Network market. A lot of first [Groupe Speciale Mobile] franchises are gone but the EU is now requiring all countries to appoint a Personal Communications Network licensee. Getting the DCS 1800 spectrum is clearly a way to test such a service if Telecom Italia Mobile wanted to get into it, he said. As for traditional mobile telephony ventures abroad, Sentinelli recognizes that such investments have become relatively expensive. But, he says, you have only to look at Orange, where there are four operators, and at American Personal Communications in Baltimore area, which took 1% of market penetration in six months, to see that the market is still to be discovered. It’s merely a question of marketing. In any case, he says, Telecom Italia Mobile would not expect return on such investments before two to four years. The Telecom Italia Mobile executive says the operator has lots of ideas for new tariffs and services for its own market, but would not discuss them for strategic reasons. He did allow, however, that the phone company will not introduce regional mobile telephony tariffs. They go against the market trend, which is more international. Mercury One-2-One network tried regional tariffs, as did Nynex in the Baltimore-Washington area, with really poor results. Although Telecom Italia Mobile has implemented mobile data services for IBM Italia SpA and the national railway, Sentinelli says everyone is waiting for this market to explode; it remains a niche market. He said TACS analog mobile subscriptions continue to grow, albeit slowly. About one fourth of new subscribers are TACS, he said. Finally, says Sentinelli, paging subscriptions continue to drop, as mobile telephony is killing all other mobile services, such as paging, two-way paging, that have limited coverage or service features.
