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To: elmatador who wrote (4304)	11/12/2001 8:42:45 PM
From: lindagraff	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Elmat, I hope I'm giving proper credit, but I believe you posted an article awhile ago from McKinsey's Quarterly titled 'Broadband's Latin Future.' I was intrigued by it and forwarded it to a friend from the Gilder Technology forum living in Caracas, Venezuela asking his opinion. For those familiar with the GTF, you'll identify him as Denny Schlesinger. After securing his permission to post his answer to me, this is the pertinent part; "Thanks for the McKinsey article. McKinsey is a top notch consulting firm and their work is highly reliable. I cannot speak for the other Latin American countries because there is so much diversity here, but the conditions in Venezuela are favorable for broadband. Since the local telco (CANTV) was privatized, they changed all the wiring and all (most?) exchanges are now digital. We have two main wireless services, Movilnet which belongs to CANTV and Telcel which is a Bell South company. CANTV offers ADSL and Telcel offers fixed wireless broadband at similar speeds and rates as the DSL service from CANTV. With the South American Crossing now in place, there is very good access to the rest of the world. For me it is a lot cheaper to have 24/7 ADSL access than to work with a 56 baud modem, before ADSL my phone bills were astronomical. I would look at broadband not on a countrywide basis but on a city by city basis. Certainly there must be 20 to 40 cities in Latin America that are worthwhile broadband markets, maybe more." The gist of my question to him had been about investing opportunities being overlooked outside of the US. Do you have any comments? Regards, Linda