Altan Redes, the consortium tasked with deploying Mexico's 4.5G shared network – called Red Compartida – has announced that it has secured a $50 million loan from shareholders.
News site El Economista says the loan will help the company to meet its financial commitments to creditors and allow it to continue extending the 4.5G – or LTE – coverage of Red Compartida, a wholesale network of telecommunications services with the constitutional mandate of having a national reach in the year 2024.
Red Compartida is funded from both public and private sources. It is expected to achieve a population coverage of 92.2 percent in 2024. Altán Redes says that by January 2022 coverage will hit 70 percent – in fact at the end of August, it already had a population reach of 66 percent and claimed about 3.5 million customers.
Importantly, its reach includes not just highly populated and commercially important regions but also nearly 87,000 localities that regular operators might see as unprofitable.
As readers will know, the company filed for bankruptcy recently ahead of a restructuring exercise. This move was intended to allow it to renegotiate its debt with creditors and continue with network deployments, with the longer-term aim of evolving its already installed infrastructure from LTE towards 5G.
El Economista quotes unofficial reports that suggest that Altan Redes owes $800 million to various creditors.
