Latin America reached 69.92 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of the second quarter, equivalent to 37.7 percent of all households and an increase of 5 percent compared to the year-earlier quarter, according to the latest data from Dataxis.

Brazil remains the region’s largest pay-TV market, accounting for 28.5 percent of the total, although Venezuela now has the highest home penetration rate, boosted by CANTV’s low cost model. Satellite TV was the leading pay-TV access technology with 50.1 percent of the total number of subscribers, said Dataxis. while America Movil had the highest number of recorded pay-TV subscribers at the end of Q2, accounting for 21.1 percent of the region’s total, followed by DirecTV, Televisa, Telefonica and Clarin.

It is expected that Telecom Italia will review its strategy in Brazil at a forthcoming board meeting due to the worsening economic situation in the country, according to CEO Marco Patuano. “For our Brazil unit, we are focused at the moment on organic investments but we need to review the strategic plan because the situation in Brazil has worsened a lot,” said Patuano at a recent event. Brazil currently generates nearly 30 percent of Telecom Italia’s revenue through its ownership of around two-thirds of TIM Brasil, and is valued at around USD $5.1 billion.

Patuano, who is off to Brazil for a Telecom Italia board meeting on 25 September, said he was concerned about the economic downturn in Brazil, above all the 14.5 percent fall in the value of the Brazilian real this year. “Most of our investments in Brazil will continue to be in US dollars,” he confirmed.

Telecom Italia also plans to use the meeting to review its strategy for mobile tower unit Inwit, for which it is seeing “strong interest”, according to Patuano. “We have built a company that is financially very light to keep our hands free and able to move in all directions,” he said, according to Reuters. Inwit operates some 11,500 sites across Italy and the operator raised around EUR 875 million after selling a 40 per cent stake in the unit in an IPO in June. A recent Bloomberg report suggested Spain’s Cellnex Telecom was considering a bid for 30 percent of the tower unit, but Patuano confirmed there had been no contact with the Spanish operator over Inwit.

Mexico’s communications and transportation ministry (SCT) has reached an agreement with UNETE (the country’s Union of Entrepreneurs for Technology in Education) to bring free internet access to over 7,600 schools.

The initiative is part of the government’s National Digital Strategy to boost digital skills and daily ICT use in schools. “The aim of this effort is to give Mexican children more solid tools with which to become part of the knowledge society,” said new communications undersecretary Monica Aspe Bernal.

Unete said the agreement will benefit over 2.4 million students and 99,000 teachers.

Clarin, the argentina based media conglomerate has reached a deal with NII Holdings to acquire a 49 percent stake in Nextel Argentina, with an option to acquire the remaining 51 percent pending regulatory approvals. Clarin said the total amount paid for the stake in Argentina’s fourth largest mobile operator was USD 178 million, of which USD 159 million was paid up front, with the remaining amount due within 30 days. NII said the net proceeds received from the transaction will be used to provide additional liquidity to support its operations in Brazil.

The operator filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2014, subsequently proceeding to sell Nextel Mexico to AT&T for USD 1.9 billion. It finally emerged from Chapter 11 in June, but reported a net loss of 64,000 subscribers in the second quarter, hurt by the weak economic climate in Brazil. NII said it would continue to control and operator Nextel Argentina pending the receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals.

According to reports, Nextel may eventually be controlled by one of Clarin’s subsidiaries, the most likely candidate being its cable unit Cablevision. Nextel is currently Argentina’s fourth largest mobile operator with a 3 percent share of the market, albeit well behind Claro (America Móvil) with 33 percent, Personal (Telecom Argentina) with 32 percent and Movistar (Telefonica), also with 32 percent.

Mexico’s Ministry of Finance and Public Credit is prepared to slash the annual payment it will impose on operators to use the 700 MHz band by 90 percent. The ministry said it will ask operators to pay USD 0.02 per MHz of spectrum per inhabitant, rather than the USD 0.2 rate it had previously proposed. The aim is to attract further investors to the project to roll out and operate a national shared mobile broadband network on the 700 MHz band.

According to the current timeline published by the telecoms regulator SCT, the government is aiming to launch the first tenders for the project in the final quarter of the year and award the licences in the first quarter of 2016. Interested providers include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Cisco Systems, Huawei, Nokia, China Telecom, Motorola Solutions and Alestra. In May the ministry announced that the cost of the initiative had been reduced from USD 10 billion to USD 7 billion over the next ten years, with the private sector assuming most of the cost of deploying some 12,000 base stations.

State-owned telecoms operator in Costa Rica, ICE has filed a complaint against the country’s Superintendency of Telecommunications (Sutel) on the grounds that the regulator’s practices are “outdated”.

According to ICE, the watchdog has failed to update its maximum rates for telephony services since 2009 and the capped rates no longer cover the cost of providing the services.

The Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) held a monopoly on both landline and mobile telephony services until 2009 but is now claiming discriminatory treatment by Sutel, requesting that the regulator meet its legal obligation to establish fair and equitable conditions in the telecommunications market.

Mexican operator Telcel has removed roaming charges on calls and data in the US for around 40 million of its prepaid customers. Calls in the US by customers of the Amigo Optimo and Optimo Plus plans will now be charged according to local rates.

The same applies when using mobile data in the US. In addition they will no longer pay long-distance fees for calls from Mexico to the US. Telcel earlier launched ‘roam like home’ rates on certain postpaid plans under its ‘Telcel Sin Frontera’ offer.