Telecommunications in Uruguay

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Uruguay

Telecommunications in Uruguay includes radio, television, telephones, and the Internet.

Radio and television

Uruguay has a mixture of privately owned and state-run broadcast media; more than 100 commercial radio stations and about 20 TV channels. Cable TV is readily available. Uruguay adopted the hybrid Japanese/Brazilian HDTV standard (ISDB-T) in December 2010.

Telephones

Internet

In Uruguay, one can access the Internet mainly by using:

Access from Uruguay to the Internet at large is concentrated in a few providers, which puts the country in the "significant risk" category for total loss of Internet connectivity in the case of internal or external turmoil. As of December 2012, the only other South American countries in this situation are Bolivia and Paraguay.[3]

ADSL

ANTEL, a telco company owned by the government, is the only ISP to provide ADSL service since it enjoys a monopoly in the basic telephony area. Other ISP use other technologies, such as radio, to get to customers.

The following are the plans marketed to home and business users by Antel as of July 2017. All plans require having a corresponding voice phone service with Antel. All prices include VAT.[4]

Consumer data plans

These plans have a bandwidth throttling data limit at 100 Gbyte, at which point their down and upload speeds get halved.

All consumer plans provide a dynamic IP address only.

Business data plans

Customers who need an ADSL connection free of bandwidth throttling and capping have to buy one of Antel's business plans, which are significantly more expensive (roughly 5x for a plan of comparable downspeed.)[5]

All business plans include 5 fixed IP addresses.

Cable Internet

Despite a fully developed cable network in all mid- and large-size cities, there is no Internet access through cable TV systems in Uruguay as it has been steadfastly opposed by government regulators.[6] Cuba is the only other country in the Americas missing this component of the Internet access ecosystem.[7]

Fiber to the home

On November 2010, ANTEL announced that it would start rolling out Fiber to the home (FTTH) in the second half of 2011.[8] As of April 2013, the Antel website claims to have connected over 389,000 homes to the Internet via fiber. There is no evidence that the government will allow private companies to offer their own fiber networks to the home. Thus, the Uruguayan state will likely continue to wield monopoly power on physical media Internet connections to the home for the foreseeable future.

As of October 2014 Antel offers the following fiber to the home plans:[4]

− * Vera   20/2 Mbit/s: up to   20 Mbit/s down and   2 Mbit/s up, monthly data capped at 150 Gbyte† for   690 UYU (29 U$S) a month

− * Vera   50/10 Mbit/s: up to   50 Mbit/s down and 10 Mbit/s up, monthly data capped at 200 Gbyte† for   990 UYU (41 U$S) a month

− * Vera   80/10 Mbit/s: up to   80 Mbit/s down and 10 Mbit/s up, monthly data capped at 250 Gbyte† for 1290 UYU (54 U$S) a month

− * Vera 120/12 Mbit/s: up to 120 Mbit/s down and 12 Mbit/s up, monthly data capped at 350 Gbyte† for 1590 UYU (66 U$S) a month

† When this cap is reached the connection is throttled back to 10% of its advertised speed for the rest of the month. Note that if a user were able to run the connection steadily at its advertised downlink speed he/she would reach the cap after a period between 5 and 16 hours and would get 10% of advertised speed for the rest of the month.

Fixed wireless

Most of Uruguay's landmass is too far away from cities to have wired Internet access. For customers in these rural and low density suburban areas, fixed wireless ISPs provide a service. Wireless Internet service has also provided city Internet users with some degree of choice in a country where private companies have not been allowed to offer wired alternatives (e.g. cable TV Internet, fiber to the home) to the state-operated ADSL service.

Dedicado is a local wireless ISP. It appeared before or about at the same time as Anteldata (about in 1999), but since ADSL was not available at the same time on every neighborhood, Dedicado had the majority of the permanent Internet connections. As of November 2007, ADSL is available in every neighborhood in Montevideo, and in most other cities, and Dedicado lost a big market share, both because being more expensive and giving bad service to their users. They started a big advertising campaign, but didn't pay attention to the technical details related to their number of users, so their quality of service decreased. As of 2012, their quality of service issues appear to be on the mend, but their pricing issues continue especially in the rural market where they have no credible competition and have steadily increased prices. Dedicado originally operated Ericsson fixed wireless equipment and later transitioned to Motorola Canopy and Cambium technology. In 2005, they started deploying WiMAX services. However, as of May 2010, the service is not offered nor advertised yet. There are other wireless ISPs, but Dedicado is the main one.

Telmex is another entrant in the Uruguayan fixed wireless space. As of early 2012, they were still a tentative player however, with limited coverage of the country and some technical shortcomings (e.g. no Skype connectivity).

In February 2012, Antel announced a push to provide fixed wireless Internet service to rural customers using their 3G cellular network.[9] As of November 2012, the service was being actively offered to customers of the company's Ruralcel fixed wireless telephone service. Customers who sign up get the equipment (a ZTE MF612/MF32 or Huawei B660 3G router) and monthly Internet service for free. While the network and router are capable of supporting multi-Mbit/s service, the free offering is throttled back to 256 kb down/64 kb upload speeds and capped at 1 Gbyte of monthly data transfer (except for a small number of customers grandfathered from a previous service). Once that data limit is reached, the customer has to recharge the service using a prepaid card at a rate of approximately US$10/Gbyte. There is an alternative monthly billing plan that offers 2 Mbit/s down and 512 Mbit/s up with a 5 Gbyte data cap for US$15, plus US$10 for each additional Gbyte (up to 5 Gbyte). There is no unlimited data plan, which limits this technology's ability to compete in the non-residential fixed wireless space against vendors like Dedicado.

Mobile wireless

Internet access via cell phone networks is probably the most vibrant and competitive Internet marketplace in Uruguay. All the Uruguayan cell phone companies (Antel, Claro, Movistar) offer data plans for their smartphone users as well as USB modems for personal computers. Ancel/Antel even offers a bundle of cellular Internet access and ADSL, an unusual but potentially attractive combination for home ADSL users who also want to have Internet access on the go. The speeds delivered by all companies within their areas of coverage keep getting faster, and the areas of coverage keep expanding (as of 2012 Ancel probably still has the edge in % of the country's land covered). Vendors are shifting from 3G to 4G, starting in the area around Montevideo. From a consumer's standpoint, the only discouraging trend in this market is the adoption of data volume caps by all vendors. As of August 2012, no vendor web-site offered an unlimited mobile Internet data plan (the closest was an "unlimited during nights and weekends" from Claro). This means these offerings are unlikely to cross sell into the fixed wireless Internet market where unlimited data plans tend to be the rule.

Internet Service Providers

The main Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Uruguay are:

Many of those services also have an installation cost, which is equal to one or two months of service.

Internet censorship and surveillance

There are no government restrictions on access to or usage of the Internet[10] or credible reports that the government monitors e-mail or Internet chat rooms without judicial oversight.[11]

Uruguayan law provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respects these rights in practice. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combine to ensure these rights. The law also prohibits arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, and the government generally respects these prohibitions in practice.[11]

In August 2016 the President of URSEC (the Uruguayan government agency equivalent to the FCC in the US) stated that his agency was at the government's beck and call to block the IP address of the servers of Uber to keep its app from operating in Uruguay. If carried out this would constitute the first and only known instance of Great Firewall style blocked-IP censorship in Uruguay. In the same interview he stated that WhatsApp "transgresses the limits of communications".[12] In July 2017 the Uruguayan subsecretary of economy stated that the government was considering "blocking the signals" of online gaming sites, which in Internet terms would seem to refer to some kind of IP-based censorship.[13][14]

In November 2016 the Uruguayan Ministry of the Interior initiated legal action against a Facebook and Twitter site ("chorros_uy") that reports criminal activity across Uruguay, alleging that it "raises public alarm".[15] The Interamerican Press Society swiftly criticized the Ministry's attempt to censor the site as "contrary to democracy's norms".[16]

As of 2017 a surveillance software suite, called "Guardián", capable of spying internet traffic, email accounts, social networks and telephone calls is being used without proper authorization from the Judiciary. [17]

References

 This article incorporates public domain material from the CIA World Factbook website https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html.

  1. 1 2 URSEC (June 2014). "Datos Estadisticos (Spanish)" (PDF). Retrieved October 29, 2014.
  2. ↑ State of the Internet Connectivity Infographic
  3. ↑ Could it happen in your country?
  4. 1 2 Anteldata website
  5. ↑ Montevideo Comm
  6. ↑ Cable TV operators to sue Uruguayan state to be allowed to offer Internet service (in Spanish)
  7. ↑ Only Cuba and Uruguay don't offer Internet access via cable modem (in Spanish)
  8. ↑ Antel FTTH Announcement (in Spanish)
  9. ↑ Antel Rural Internet Announcement (in Spanish)
  10. ↑ "Uruguay", Freedom in the World 2013, Freedom House, 11 January 2013. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  11. 1 2 "Uruguay", Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, 21 March 2013. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  12. ↑ El presidente de la Ursec dijo que el organismo 'está a la orden' de que el gobierno solicite el bloqueo de la aplicación", El Pais TV. Retrieved 26 August 2016 (in Spanish)
  13. ↑ FA pide destinar crecimiento extra del PIB a prioridades", El Pais. Retrieved 23 July 2017 (in Spanish)
  14. ↑ Gobierno quiere gravar a las plataformas digitales pero no sabe cómo hacerlo", El Observador. Retrieved 23 July 2017 (in Spanish)
  15. ↑ Interior denunció a la cuenta Chorros Uy por 'infundir temor', El Pais. Retrieved 11 November 2016 (in Spanish)
  16. ↑ SIP condena las acciones legales del gobierno contra la cuenta ChorrosUy, El Pais. Retrieved 11 November 2016 (in Spanish)
  17. ↑ Control sobre "El Guardián", El Pais. Retrieved 10 March 2017 (in Spanish)
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