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According to Marcelo Abreu, a Director at Antel Telecomunicaciones, Uruguay was the first country in Latin America with an all-digital telephone network, since 1995.
Antel is the state-owned incumbent telephone operator in Uruguay. Its overall fixed line penetration is 31 per cent yet ADSL penetration is only five per cent, at 160,000 subscribers.
Antel is addressing the same choices facing other operators worldwide who are thinking about IPTV: whether to use Ethernet or ATM transport for DSL (it is going Ethernet), to use MPLS or Ethernet for aggregation, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 for encoding, how to architect the infrastructure and whether to outsource IPTV operations.
There are four privately owned TV stations in Uruguay, plus a fifth that is government-owned. Antel’s only fixedline TV competition in Montevideo would come from three cable operators that share a single analogue coax network in the city. Although Antel is the country’s monopoly fixed-line telephone operator, it has only 46 per cent of the million-subscriber mobile market. Its mobile network is a combination of GSM, TDMA and AMPS, and the company hosted the first 3G mobile trial network on the continent.
Although Mr Abreu made no service announcements during his presentation at the IPTV World Forum Latin America conference, held in Rio de Janeiro at the end of January, he made clear that the operator will differentiate itself via synergies with its mobile platform, in the hope that it can increase its penetration both for DSL and mobile.
Report: Steve Hawley
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