Iusacell Offering Fiber-Optic Internet, Phone to Challenge Televisa, Slim

Grupo Iusacell SA, the mobile-phone carrier owned by billionaire Ricardo Salinas, is offering fiber- optic Internet and phone plans to compete with Grupo Televisa SA and Carlos Slim’s Telefonos de Mexico SAB.

The service is available in the capital, Guadalajara and Monterrey, the country’s three largest cities, according to promotional materials on Mexico City-based Iusacell’s website. Customers can get download speeds of up to 20 megabits a second for 1,799 pesos ($138) a month.

Salinas is getting into the land-line business to outflank Televisa, which operates three Mexican cable companies that offer phone and Internet services, and which is starting a mobile-phone alliance with NII Holdings Inc. Iusacell’s fiber- optic technology may also be used to offer TV plans.

Iusacell’s fastest fiber-optic download speed is more than three times the highest rate offered by Televisa’s Empresas Cablevision SAB in Mexico City and more than four times that of Slim’s Telmex, according to those companies’ websites. Slim also controls America Movil SAB, Mexico’s largest mobile-phone company.

Iusacell is in third place among Mexican wireless carriers, also trailing Telefonica SA. Dan McCosh, a spokesman for Salinas’s group of companies, declined to comment.

Televisa rose 14 centavos to 48.30 pesos at 12:33 p.m. in Mexico City trading. Mexico City-based Telmex, the biggest phone and Internet carrier in Mexico, gained 12 centavos to 9.45 pesos.

To contact the reporter on this story: Crayton Harrison in Mexico City at Tharrison5@bloomberg.net

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