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Mobile Market

The spiraling rise of the mobile phone market in Chile took by surprise - as it did in many other parts of the world - a large number of forecasters and industry experts. Some of the mobile equipment producers that have been operating in the Chilean market, for example, expected that the 410,000 of mobile subscribers that the market had in 1997 would reach the one million threshold by the end of 2000. Yet, it took only one year for the market to almost reach that mark. By the turn of the century there were almost 3.5 million mobile subscribers.product of a market that had been experiencing growth rates of more than 130 percent in the years 1998 and 1999.

As of mid-2001 there were four mobile operators in Chile: BellSouth, Entel, Telefonica and Smartcom. Of these, three were managed by European companies (Spain and Italy), and one by an U.S. based firm. The main providers of mobile telephony equipment were Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Nortel.

Growth of wireline and mobile subscribers in Chile, 1991 to 2000 Source: CEPAL 2000 and Subtel 2001

Since the granting of the PCS licenses in 1997 the market has grown from around 400.000 subscribers to some 3.5 million at the end of 2000.

Even though the number of mobile subscribers had surpassed that of fixed line telephony by the end of 2000 (there were 3.4 million mobile subscribers versus 3.3 million fixed line subscribers) the latter still continues to generate most of the traffic.in part due to the lower cost of services.