Colombia’s national fibre project awarded

Union Temporal Fibra Optica Colombia, a joint venture between TV Azteca and Total Play has been selected by Colombia’s Ministry of Information Technology and Communications (MTIC) to deploy and maintain a nationwide fibre-optic network. The network will connect 1,078 municipalities, and consist of 15,000km of optical fibre. As previously reported by CommsUpdate, the project is a public-private partnership, allocated COP415.8 billion (USD216.6 million) by the government; it aims to increase the number of internet connections in the country to 8.8 million by 2014. Expected to take 30 months to deploy, the MTIC claims that the network will increase the proportion of the population with broadband access to 90%.