Uruguay breaks the half-century monopoly of state-owned Antel on Internet service

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Uruguay’s telecommunications regulator, which reports directly to the Executive Branch headed by President Luis Lacalle Pou, authorized five cable companies that offer audiovisual services to enter the fixed broadband Internet business for the first time in the country’s history.

It puts an end to the monopoly that the state-owned Antel maintained for almost fifty years in this service and with which these companies can now configure triple-play packages nationwide by also adding telephony service.

The determination of the Regulatory Unit of Communications Services of Uruguay, an agency equivalent to the Mexican IFT and known as Ursec, only enabled these five companies to enter this service because, in December 2014, they filed an unconstitutionality action against Article 56 of the Uruguayan Audiovisual Communication Services Law (LSCA).

The Uruguayan Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) gave them the reason in 2016, although it has been until 2022 when the State authorized them to market Internet services.

Article 56 of this legislation still restricts companies that already commercialize pay-TV from offering telephony and data transmission.

In itself, the article prohibits cross-ownership between television and telecommunications, which also banned until recently the entry of América Móvil and Telefónica to restricted television services, in the particular case of these companies through satellite access.

The companies benefiting from Ursec’s decision are Korfield, Montecable, Praimar, Nuevo Siglo, and TCC, which have already received a class B telecommunications license to provide data transmission services.

Thus, the state-owned National Telecommunications Administration or Antel will have five new competitors in the broadband business.

Other companies from the pay-TV sector may soon join, given an initiative presented in the Uruguayan Congress that appeals to the repeal of article 56 of the LSCA and thus further speed up the convergence of services.

According to the regulator Ursec, by the end of 2021, Uruguay had a total of 1.08 million accesses to residential fixed broadband Internet service and a penetration of 80% in this service, all due to the work of Antel.

Regarding restricted television, Ursec said there are 606,609 pay-TV accesses in the country.

Uruguay had 4.48 million inhabitants in 2021, and according to estimates of the local telecommunications sector, there would still be a market of 300,000 households in the country without decent Internet access, in principle, a potential market for those five companies that have already obtained their license to provide fixed broadband.

Antel is an Uruguayan state-owned operator founded in 1974, offering Internet connectivity to 80% of the country’s households, with more than 71% of this via a fiber-optic connection.

In April 2019, the National Telecommunications Administration presented, with the help of Nokia, the first commercial 5G network running over the 28 GHz band in the municipality of San Carlos.

With information from El Economista