The Instituto Costaricense de Electricidad, known as ICE, the Costa Rican’s  state  Electricity Institute, is in trouble; while it has directed it energy towards cell phone and data for profit these last few years, its inability to compete with private competitors,  Claro from Spain and Azules y Platas, a subsidiary from America Movil in Mexico, together with a service that is not always delivering, means its days could indeed be counted. According to the firm Pyramid Research who conducted a market intelligence study and predicted a 75 per cent loss of telecom market shares for ICE within the next few years, ICE could soon start to loose its revenue as it will reach the hands of the competitors. This would eventually drag ICE out of business all together and loose up to $623 million in future profit as  the Cell Phone market is expected to to keep on growing to by 6.1% over the next 4 years. An expected growth of 3.7 had been predicted for all Latin America. In January, Telefonica and America Movil have agreed to pay $95 et $77 million respectively and operate the frequencies of the cellular phone for the next fifteen years in the telecom market of this country. It is expected that ICE will focus on “post-paid”customers, although “pre-paid”was proven to be a real success, here as well as in other neighbouring countries. By 2015, most customers may have switched to pre-paid and this mean that they will drop ICE, who will still use post-paid, according to the Pyramide Research. The research company also took a look at the battle for the telecom shares for the next five years; they expect broadband services to trip and paid television service to increase by more than 50%, causing more pressure on ICE as the local cable television companies, Amnet and Cable Tica, are providing cheap, good quality international phone services.

Meanwhile the service provided by ICE is far from satisfactory, with network failure happening far too often; no later than 21st of this month did 800.000 users were left without cell phone. An unacceptable outrage in this day and age.

It is not looking good for the ICE, facing competitors able to offer better technology and service as well as more convenient payment methods….It is not looking good at all.!

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Filed under: Living, Technology on February 25th, 2011