Communications in Colombia
Open-knowledge reference entry
Since being liberalized in 1991, the Colombian telecommunications sector has added new services, expanded coverage, improved efficiency, and lowered costs. The sector has had the second largest (after energy) investment in infrastructure (54 percent) since 1997. However, the economic downturn between 1999 and 2002 adversely affected telecommunications. During this period, Colombia's telecommunications industry lost US$2 billion despite a profit of US$1 billion in local service. In June 2003, the government liquidated the state-owned and heavily indebted National Telecommunications Company (Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones—Telecom) and replaced it with Colombia Telecomunicaciones (Colombia Telecom). The measure enabled the industry to expand rapidly, and in 2004 it constituted 2.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Telefónica of Spain acquired 50 percent plus one share of the company in 2006.
As a result of increasing competition, Colombia has a relatively modern telecommunications infrastructure that primarily serves larger towns and cities. Colombia's telecommunication system includes access to 8 different international Submarine cable systems, Intelsat, 11 domestic satellite Earth stations, and a nationwide microwave radio relay system.
Telephones
The country's teledensity (the density of telephone lines in a community) is relatively high for Latin America (17 percent in 2006).
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5154198. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1997, 1999 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Communications in Colombia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.