MAP > Internet Providers in Bolivia

Bolivia Entel has intended to fiber all the capital cities by the year 2020. Despite Bolivia enjoying very strong economic development in recent years, the GDP has remained among the lowest in the South America region. Many of the areas of this country outside main cities have been poor, and at the same time, they are undeveloped. There has been a sizeable proportion of the population that live in the remote valleys as well as areas where the telecom infrastructure has chronically been neglected. Well, as a result, penetration of the telecom services is a bit low.

Structure of the Bolivia’s fixed telecom market has been quite different from most of the countries. The local services that have primarily been offered by the fifteen telecom cooperatives. Usually, these are the non-profit making companies that are privately owned and also controlled by the owners. Since the market was usually liberalized, cooperatives have also offered the long distance telephony while several others offer the broadband as well as the pay TV services. They have gone an extra mile and invested in the network upgrades in the bid to be able to improve their services for the customers that they serve and also go ahead and expand their footprints.

Bolivia is the multi-carrier system where the consumers can be able to choose the long distance carrier for every call by being able to dial carrier prefix. Various operators have been able to adopt the fixed wireless technology and some rent the fiber optic capacity. Entel, which is a state-owned company, is the nation’s long-distance operator that also offers the local telephone, satellite pay-TV utilities and the DSL. The subsidiary of this company by the name Entel Motiv has grown to become the largest mobile network provider. Bolivia’s fixed broadband services have remained slowest and also the most costly in the Latin America region. These services are usually unavailable in many of the rural areas as well as the remote parts, and sometimes even in some of the major urban areas.

Well, Bolivia being a landlocked country, it has no direct access to any of the submarine cable networks, and therefore, it must connect to rest of the world either using the satellite or even through the terrestrial links across the neighboring countries. Since its renationalization in the year 2007, Entel has aimed at offering the telecom services in the rural areas under the project that was known as Territory with the Total Coverage.