Telecom Argentina to include Starlink in corporate offering

Telecom Argentina is close to signing an agreement with Starlink to include satellite broadband offerings for businesses.

“We are signing... next week we will begin marketing,” Julio Hutka, the company's B2B business director, said in response to a question from BNamericas during the annual Telecom SummIT event.

"Our clients need turnkey projects where we connect everything: where there's a network and where there's no network, so we need to have all the technologies in-house or from third parties," he added.

In the case of Starlink, Hutka said the delay in being able to start marketing the service was due to negotiations over contractual conditions.

In Argentina, the companies Telefónica, Sencinet and Telespazio are already marketing Starlink services for the corporate market.

“We always wanted to have it in our portfolio,” Hutka said, underscoring that the solution could be useful for connecting schools in remote areas or as a first connectivity option for mining camps.

Hutka explained that once a mining camp is developed, other technology, such as private 4G or 5G networks, may be necessary.

Telecom Argentina has around 15 private networks in operation, mainly in the agricultural sector in the Pergamino-Rojas region in Entre Ríos and in the so-called lithium triangle in the northwest.

The company also plans to incorporate other low-orbit solutions, such as Amazon's Kuiper, when they become available.

Telecom also provides high-capacity links for low-orbit constellations. “The infrastructure on the ground, to a greater or lesser extent, is Telecom’s,” he said.

B2B business

The company, which aims to expand its volume of digital business, indicated that 75% of the turnover of the B2B business is currently from networking and 25% from digital services (cloud, security and IoT).

However, in monthly sales, 50% are in connectivity and 50% in value-added services.

“Among the highest value clients, 60-70% is digital and the rest is connectivity,” said Hutka. “We're constantly upselling our clients.”

The goal is to double revenue from B2B services by 2030. Next year, the company expects growth of at least 10%.

This year, despite the economic recession in Argentina, the company managed to grow its revenues slightly in dollars. “Networking didn't shrink, it remained flat. Prices went down, but volumes went up [in terms of measured traffic/number of megabytes],” he said.

Hulka also pointed out that Telecom Argentina accounts for about 60% of the total connectivity business in the country. Most business clients operate on Telecom's networks, although it also has digital business clients that do not use the company's connectivity.

The Telecom business segment includes 5,000 large corporate clients and nearly 8,000 small and medium-sized companies.

Investments

At the opening of the Telecom SummIT event, Telecom CEO Roberto Nobile said that this year the company will be investing a total of US$520mn.

In addition to the deployment of 5G and fiber optics, part of these investments will go to the datacenter business. Telecom has five datacenters, the largest of which is in the town of Pacheco in Buenos Aires province.

The company said that many of the hyperscalers have content hosted in its datacenters. “We have a team that travels to the United States constantly to serve this ecosystem of hyperscalers to entice them to come and work in Argentina and operate on Telecom infrastructure,” he added.

The major cloud hyperscalers are AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, among others. Some of these companies are Telecom partners for the B2B solutions business.