Advanced services deployment in Latin America

We know that the deregulation process and the market opening are very important issues in today's telecom life. The process has been different in each continent. The scope of this study does not cover the whole world, but the study is made from the Latin America point of view, especially Mexico. There has been a trend in which advanced services are the differentiating factors and play a key role in a service provider's success. Examples of these advanced services are card calling, split charging, and toll-free calling. Their implementation was initially embedded in switching software, which hindered fast deployment of new services. The intelligent network architectural framework was born in the 1980s as a remedy. Its goal is to allow the rapid and uniform creation and management of advanced telecommunications services. The intelligent network (IN) concept relies on the separation of call control and service control to ease the deployment of new services. These new services do not need to be wireline services, in fact the future points out that wireless services will be the most demanded ones. In this paper, we first indicate the overall scope in the Latin America intelligent network infrastructure through an examination of the telecom market in Latin America. Then we discuss the difficulties faced by carriers in the deployment of advanced wireless services. Finally, we present a proposed architecture for the deployment of advanced IN services in the Latin America telecommunications market.