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Ministry to auction WiMax licenses July 14 2006
[June 27, 2006]

Ministry to auction WiMax licenses July 14 2006


(BNamericas.com Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Colombia's communications ministry plans to auction 3.5GHz spectrum for wireless broadband services on July 14, 2006, according to a government statement.

The information comes from a recent resolution setting the guidelines under which the ministry will offer two blocks of spectrum in each of the country's 32 departments.

Each block of spectrum represents 28MHz of bandwidth and no applicant may have more than one license in each department.

The licenses will be suitable for point-to-point and point-multipoint systems to provide wireless broadband access.

In related news, long-distance operator Orbitel plans to make the city of Cali the first in the country to have a citywide WiMax service, the company said in a press release.

Orbitel has developed and deployed the platform to offer this service to Cali and other Colombian cities in partnership with US networking solutions provider Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO), while German equipment supplier Siemens (NYSE: SI) will provide transmission infrastructure.



Cisco is also providing all the equipment required to guarantee WiMax network capacity over Orbitel's Core MPLS network.

Orbitel, local partner Desca, Cisco and Siemens have been working together for the last eight months to build the next generation network.

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