MAP > Internet Providers in Colombia

Colombia’s telecom infrastructure is quite well developed in main business centers, where the service availability is quite high by the regional standards. However, the infrastructure has remained poor in the small urban centers as well as the rural areas. The government has gone ahead and sought to address with various public programs, supported by the effective regulatory instruments, and this has gone on and facilitated entry of the operators to the mobile market in the bid to improve competition and also extend the availability of the mobile broadband services nationally.

Colombia has close to 20 local telephony providers, who have been operating municipally, nationally or even regionally. Many of the began private companies but later went on to become a public concern owned by the respective municipalities. A number of the lines in service progresses to fall continuously with the customers abandoning the traditional phones in the preference for the mobile connectivity. As in the other Latin America countries, most of the existing fixed telephone lines have been concentrated in larger cities, leaving rest of population underserviced. The broadband penetration is quite high for this region, though the growth in sector got hampered by poor fixed-line infrastructure in very many of country’s 32 departments. The government has gone on and launched various initiatives to be able to increase the broadband take up, and this is including a national ICT plan by the year 2008-09 and Live Digital for People 2014-18 program. Such efforts have enjoyed success leading to the far higher growth in some broadband subscriptions among lower socio-economic groups in recent years.

The DSL has had a declining market share as well as the fiber-based broadband that has developed strongly through most of the infrastructure has yet to be concentrated in the high-density urban areas. The development in the mobile market has gone on and slowed down in the recent years though it does retain significant potential, in particular in a mobile broadband sector where the penetration is quite low and where the strong demand exists in the rural areas where the fixed line infrastructure is so poor. TigoUne, Movistar, and VClaro get to dominate the mobile market even though a number of MVNOs have been very active.

The report offers the overview of the Colombia telecom market as well as the market regulatory environment, combined with the profiles of major fixed as well as fixed wireless broadband markets and with the statistics and the subscriber forecasts.