Retevisión
Retevisión is a Spanish telecommunications company and a subsidiary of Abertis.
History
Retevision was born in 1989 as a public company, a division of the national public Radiotelevisión Española. Its original mission was to provide transportation for the television and radio signals throughout Spain.
In 1996 the government of the People's Party decided to liberalise the Spanish telecommunications market, and a license was granted to Retevision.
In 1997 it was decided to move the company headquarters from Madrid to Barcelona. That same year Retevision was acquired by Telecom Italia and the Spanish electricity utilities Endesa and Union Fenosa. The commercial launch occurred in January 1998.
The company was operating without a network, and users of Telefónica that were Retevision subscribers needed to prepend the prefix 050, which was later replaced by 1050, to the number in order to dial to route calls to Retevision.
At first, customers could only call other provinces with Retevisión. With the liberalisation of the local loop, in September 1998 Retevisión customers could make local calls.
That same year, Retevisión bought the pioneers of the Internet in Spain, Servicom and RedesTB and launched their own internet service provider (ISP) under the brand iddeo.
In June 1998 the company obtained a license for mobile telephony, and began operations in 1999 under the brand name Amena through its subsidiary Retevisión Móvil.
Throughout 1999 it also launched data services over IP for enterprises (VPN networking sites), and direct voice and data by radio link, although the latter services had little success.
In Summer 2000, iddeo launched the ADSL service for businesses.
In the Basque region, Euskaltel retained its exclusivity versus Retevision therefore fixed telephony and the transmission of radio and television was performed by Euskaltel.
The brand Retevision as a telephony operator was abandoned in 2002 in favor of the new name Auna, a merger between Retevision and the cable operator AunaCable (both companies being part of Grupo Auna).
Retevision, as transmitters of signals from radio and television, was sold by Grupo Auna, retaining its name and brand.
In 2005, Auna was absorbed by the operator ONO in 2005.