ON*NET Fibra announced this last Wednesday, July 14th, it has started operating in Chile. It is a new wholesaler that will offer an open and neutral FTTH service and will promote access to broadband services. The company comes up as a result of the acquisition by the KKR investment fund of 60% of InfraCO, a subsidiary of Telefonica Chile, in order to implement the first free access FTTH network in the country.
ON*NET informed that it will keep a large part of Telefonica’s team, although it will also add KKR’s experience, know-how and financial resources, and will feature a work team of more than 100 professionals.
‘We operate a state-of-the-art fiber optic network, built with the highest technical standards in the industry, which will be open for other telecommunications companies to use, offering their own broadband and fiber optic connections to their end customers’, reported Jose Miguel Torres, CEO at ON*NET Fibra.
According to the information reported, the company’s aim is focused on reaching the greatest number of areas that have a demand for FTTH. This way, ON*NET is developing a growth plan for the future, in which it forecasts that more than 50% of the households in its deployment plan are located outside the urban areas with the highest income in the country. In addition, the company reported that it will make a more than USD 130 million investment in the coming 18 months, with the aim of improving the service and expanding the network. The initial investment plan will extend FTTH coverage from the current 2.4 million households, to around 3.5 million homes by the end of next year, in line with the purpose of growing the provision of these types of offers throughout Chile. According to ON*NET, this growth is equivalent to the company reaching 70% of households located in urban areas within Chile with its access to FTTH offers.
ON*NET Fibra has already established negotiations with telecommunications companies to be potential clients of its services, and has even begun its first dialogues to align goals with the deployment of FTTH in Chile in mind. In addition, the company will offer point-to-point connections, which can be used by telecommunications companies to interconnect 5G network sites on their mobile networks, and other services that require this type of connection.
‘We believe that the creation of our company comes at a key moment for the industry, since our aims and our mission, in some way, will guarantee the provision of critical services in the current and future post-pandemic stage, where telemedicine, distance education and telework are becoming more and more relevant’, reported Torres.