The authority says it will investigate two allegations that Comcel abused its dominant position in the market for mobile communications.
Comcel is accused of failing to provide its competitors with adequate interconnection capacity to its network, which is preventing them from guaranteeing their customers the ability to call Comcel network’s users.
The authority says it will investigate whether Comcel obstructed competitor access to its network, delayed interconnection processes and discriminated against them by “imposing disadvantageous conditions”.
It says it will also consider allegations that Comcel charged competitors unfair and discriminatory fees for accessing its network to operate international calls.
The authority suspects that Comcel, which was obliged by the telecoms regulator to provide access to its network in return for a fee, discriminated against its competitors and granted better conditions to its own unit handling international calls, Infracel.
According to the authority, the telecoms regulator set a maximum access fee over which “negotiations were held” and obliged Comcel to offer “non-discriminatory treatment”, but América Móvil’s subsidiary may have failed to do so.
The investigation was prompted by complaints from long-distance call providers Conmudata and Avantel. The authority says it also considered findings from a market study of the international long-distance phone calls market conducted by the country’s telecoms regulator.
Previous attempts by the Colombian authority to punish América Móvil failed in 2010, when the authority retracted a 932 million peso (US$526,000) fine imposed on the company two years earlier for abusing its dominant position by charging excessive prices for calls between mobile and fixed-line telephones. The agency reconsidered the allegations after Comcel appealed against the fine.
The authority, which is only three years old, has taken significant steps to improve its enforcement since then, says Ana Paula Martinez, at Levy & Salomão Advogados in São Paulo and an independent adviser to the antitrust body.
“In the recent past, the antitrust division of the superintendency is significantly increasing the enforcement activity regarding both cartel and abuse of dominance cases,” she says. “The new investigation against Comcel follows the lines of similar [telecoms] investigations of the Brazilian Secretariat of Economic Law and the European Commission.”
América Móvil, which is owned by Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, has also been the subject of antitrust scrutiny in other Latin American countries, notably in Mexico, where it is based. Last April, Mexico’s Federal Competition Commission fined the telecoms giant US$1 billion for abusing its dominant position.
