The director representing the Broad Front in ANTEL, Daniel Larrosa, affirmed that everything is ready for the state company to put its much-announced 5G network into operation, that is, the fifth generation of cellular telephony with internet, which would put it at an advantage because the private operators Claro and Movistar “are far behind.”
Larrosa added that Antel has been delaying implementation, “doing the transnationals a favor.”
Larrosa explained in the program Informative Menu that, regarding this decision, “they (the transnationals) are behind ANTEL: if ANTEL launched the fifth generation (5G of cellular telephony) before them, surely 6 or 12 months before, that would have a strong impact on the mobile market in favor of ANTEL”, he highlighted.
“What the transnationals want is – they have already stated it even in Parliament – to share the ANTEL fiber” because “ANTEL’s optical fiber allows the installation of high-density radio bases (antennas), which is what 5G requires; So first they want to share the fiber and given the reiterated refusal in the Legislature to share ANTEL’s fiber, it has been delayed until the fiber is shared”, added the Frente Amplio director.
All this, he added, is intended to harm the state telephone company and favor private competitors: the network could be working from the beginning of 2022, because by then the network was ready while the Uruguayan market already has cell phones and tablets that support 5G.
This being the case, we would already be at least a year behind with this supposed business decision.
Lack of staff
Another of the problems that the hierarch alerted is the lack of personnel in the company: “we are already around 900 fewer people since this administration started, we are talking about 900 in 6,000, 15% fewer people, and without a single replacement , no one has entered Antel; It’s going to have effects,” he said.
Such effects will be felt “especially in the part where a lot of labor is used, which is in claims (…) and in the sales part, we go out to the stores and all of them lack vendors; then another very affected sector is everything that has to do with software and data center ”, he concluded in the radio program that is broadcast by M24.
