Spotlight: The investments of Bolivia's Entel

Bolivia's state-owned telecommunications company Entel plans to install 700 base stations in 2023 to expand its telephony and internet services.

The company will end this year with 10,200 base stations compared to 9,432 at the end of 2021.

The plan for next year is to install 200 in places where there is currently no type of service, according to state news agency ABI.

For several years Entel has been investing heavily in expanding mobile services in areas with low or no connectivity.

The company had 62% of its base stations in urban areas at the end of April while 38% were in rural areas, according to the latest data published by Entel.

The company's strong growth in rural areas is partly driven by its participation in the Prontis social inclusion program of the public works ministry, which in its first two phases between 2016 and 2020 saw the installation of 806 base stations for telephony and mobile data.

Phase three, which in April was 65% complete, includes 103 new base stations that will benefit 103 towns with populations of between 50 and 2,000 inhabitants. With an investment of 251mn bolivianos (US$35.3mn), the project began in November 2020 and will end in March 2023.

Some of the investments made this year by Entel in mobile telephony include 7mn bolivianos for base stations in Uyaca, San Juan del Rosario and Cuevas, and another 7mn in the department of Cochabamba, 4mn in Potosí and 4mn in Oruro.

Each base station cost the company around 2.4mn bolivianos.

Prontis' fourth phase foresees the installation of 220 base stations with an investment of 499mn bolivianos.

At the end of June, Entel had more than 6mn mobile phone subscribers in a market of 12.1mn lines, according to the latest figures from sector regulator ATT.

The departments of La Paz, Santa Cruz and Cochabamba have the highest mobile penetration in the country, while Pando, Potosí and Beni, with larger rural populations, have the lowest penetration.

FIBER

At end-April, Entel had 28,272km of deployed fiber optics with 10,765 km corresponding to the access network. 

The company saw the number of fiber-to-the-home clients increase by 33,898 in the three months through April, to 360,000.