Claro República Dominicana

Claro (formerly Compañía Dominicana de Teléfonos) is the largest telecommunications company in the Dominican Republic and provides local, long-distance, and wireless voice services, as well as Internet and IPTV services, to approximately four million customers.

Background

Previously known as CODETEL (Compañía Dominicana de Teléfonos), the name change was announced February 2, 2004 at the National Theater of Santo Domingo in a ceremony to welcome the Verizon brand to the country. On April 3, 2006 Verizon agreed to sell its stakes in Verizon Dominicana along with Telecomunicaciones de Puerto Rico Inc. (TELPRI) in Puerto Rico to Carlos Slim Helú's group América Móvil for $3.7 billion.^[1]. On January 31, 2007 the company's new owners, América Móvil, announced their decision to rename it to the previous CODETEL name, for their land telecom business and Claro for their mobile services. On January 20, 2011 Oscar Peña, the company's president, announced the company's brands would be unified and would become Claro as a part of a global unification across Latin America, where América Móvil's services are under the Claro brand.^[2] América Móvil owns 100% of the company.

History

CODETEL began offering telephone service in the Dominican Republic during the 1940s as a subsidiary of the US firm General Telephone and Electronics, and held a de facto monopoly until the mid 1990s. After the Dominican government passed Law 153 in 1998 providing for effective liberalization and improved pro-competition regulation, new entrants had eroded CODETEL's predominant position with the incumbent capturing only 50% of the international traffic to the United States (accounting for 70% of the total international traffic).^[3] In 2000 Verizon was formed after a merger by Bell Atlantic and GTE, with CODETEL continuing operations as a subsidiary of the new company. During November 2003 CODETEL selected Nortel Networks to provide a Voice over Internet Protocol network intended to converge voice and data traffic, help drive lower operating costs, and provide advanced services throughout the country.^[4] During December of the same year CODETEL announced the commercial launch of its Flash Movil 3G network, a CDMA2000 1X voice and high-speed data network using equipment, software and services from Lucent Technologies.^[5].

Claro provides services over CDMA 1xEV-DO in 800/1900 MHz, GSM/GPRS/EDGE in 850/1900 MHz, and 3G UMTS/HSPA service on the 850 MHz band.

Services

Consumer

Multiplan

Claro Multiplan is a brand under which Claro offers Telephone, Internet, and IPTV services. The bundles also include discounts on mobile Internet and mobile TV.

Internet

Claro provides Broadband Internet access to its customers over fixed ADSL2+ and mobile UMTS/HSPA. The bandwidths offered for fixed internet on standalone plans^[6] and on Multiplans^[7] are as follows:

Claro's mobile internet packages are as follows:^[8]

Note the prepaid plans still be used after the data allowance has been exceeded however the speed will be reduced to 128kbps until the requested plan runs out.

Television

Claro offers fixed television services over Microsoft Mediaroom and satellite.^[9] It also provides mobile television services over Rok TV.^[10] Mobile television services are offered as daily and monthly packages.

Enterprise

Claro offers their enterprise customers mobile and fixed telephone, mobile, fixed, dedicated, and satellite Internet, Internet Backhaul, Colocation, Web Hosting, IPTV, equipment rental, and SMS services.

Management

The Current President of CODETEL is Oscar Peña Chacón.

Notes

External links

• Claro República Dominicana
• América Móvil