Digicel goes for Panamanian mobile license

The fantastic Irish GSM operator Digicel is bidding for a license in Panama.

This is fantastic news for Panama as a country and it’s citizens in particular. It is terrible news for Cable and Worthless and Movistar the two incumbent providers.

Digicel has since it opened for business in Jamaica in 2001 torn a new rear entrance hole in Cable & Wireless’ customer hostile business practices throughout the Caribbean.

Digicel offered the Caribbean mobile phone consumers phones and services equal to what European consumers are used to and wait actually believe in customer service. With Digicel the customers got modern phones, cheap calls, per second billing, prepaid roaming, transfer of prepaid minutes between accounts and responsive service.

Digicel describes it like this:

The incredible success story of Digicel began five years ago in April 2001 when Digicel exploded on to the Jamaican scene with the country’s first GSM mobile service, revolutionizing the telecommunications industry there and in the rest of the Caribbean.

In our first 100 days of operation in Jamaica, we secured 100,000 phone subscribers - a goal originally established for the company’s one-year mark. Never before in the history of mobile telecommunications had such tremendous growth been seen in a network, as Digicel broke record after record in surpassing its major competitor as the mobile provider with the largest customer base on the island. The story so far

Now they have over 4 million subscribers in the Caribbean and have also entered El Salvador and several pacific islands. I would imagine that their entrance in Haiti with now more than 1 million subscribers is doing more good than any amount of foreign aid the country receives.

The other potential entrant in Panama is the Mexican America Movil owned by Carlos Slim; the worlds 3rd richest man. I know nothing about their business practises, but it wouldn’t surprise me that they are stuck in the same idiotic treatment of customers as the rest of the Latin American phone industry.

I’m trying to find out if there is more than one license up for sale. If there is only one I really hope that Digicel wins it. I also hope that Digicel rolls out a GSM1900 network and not the annoying GSM850 frequency that the two incumbents use.