Telefonica to offer wholesale Net access in Brazil. Before CLECs were fighting to get into this copper plant. Today it is the ILEC that is offering the obsolete technology.
Telefonica to offer wholesale Net access in Brazil
By Reuters staff
01 November 2001
Spain's Telefonica said on Wednesday it plans to open its fixed-line network in Brazil's Sao Paulo state to third-parties that want to offer fast-access Internet.
Telefonica's vice president for regulatory matters, Eduardo Navarro, said the company would unveil the terms of its new service in 60 days.
In general, the service should allow companies to offer high-speed ADSL Internet access through Telefonica's vast network in Sao Paulo state.
"This is another step toward a full unbundling," Navarro told reporters at the Futurecom 2001 telecommunications fair, in reference to the industry term for when a company opens its network to other parties.
ADSL, or asymmetric digital subscriber lines, allows customers to use the Internet at much higher speeds than traditional dial-up modems.
Telefonica had only offered to partially open its network, drawing the interest of companies like Diveo, LinkSat and Pegasus, although none has yet signed up.
Telefonica's decision to further open the network comes after Brazil's Anatel telecommunications regulator said companies needed to offer their competitors equal access to their networks.
Telefonica won the rights to operate fixed-line local telephone service in Sao Paulo state, Brazil's richest and most populous state, after the telephone company's 1998 privatization.
Telefonica counts some 11 million clients in Sao Paulo, 60,000 of which are already ADSL users. |
