State-owned Venezuelan cellco Movilnet, a division of national telco CANTV, has confirmed that it now has a total of 280 4G base transceiver stations (BTS) in service, following its 22 January LTE launch. Carlos Silva, vice president of operations and systems, told El Universal that 4G connectivity is currently available in the following locations: Capital District (Caracas), Miranda, Anzoategui, Valencia (the capital of Carabobo State), Maracaibo (the capital of Zulia State) and Puerto Ayacucho (the capital of Amazonas state). Going forward, Movilnet seeks to deploy a total of 600 4G BTS by year-end.
In a further development of note, the executive noted that Movilnet expects to stage a ‘definitive shutdown’ of its legacy CDMA-based infrastructure by December 2018, commenting: ‘The CDMA network has been in the process of migrating subscribers for some time, however the definitive shutdown is planned for December 2018. This will not affect the rest of our existing 2G and 3G networks.’
Finally, last month marked the ten-year anniversary of the re-nationalisation of Movilnet parent CANTV. The news site notes that Movilnet now claims a total of 14.615 million wireless subscribers, up from 8.356 million at the time of the government takeover, while CANTV now boasts around seven million fixed lines in service and 2.5 million broadband subscribers.