Compared with many neighboring countries in Latin America, Chile has formulated a relatively tight time 5G network construction plan. Chilean officials said the country intends to buy 5G network equipment from US or Chinese suppliers, including Huawei.

Chile’s Deputy Minister of Telecommunications, Pamela Gidi, stated that as long as companies meet the established technical standards for cyber security, Chile will not make special regulations on the “supply chain or nationality” of suppliers contracting to build 5G networks. , This undoubtedly opened the door for its purchase of Huawei equipment.

China and the United States are Chile's first and second largest trading partners, respectively. The Chilean government hopes to speed up the construction of 5G networks with an open and welcoming attitude to all global suppliers. At the end of 2020, Huawei announced the establishment of a second cloud data center in San Diego.

Gidi said this may also attract the arrival of Amazon's subsidiary AWS, which has already considered building a data center in Chile or its neighboring country, Argentina. He added: “We think it’s clear that building a 5G network can help Amazon and other companies that decide to settle in Chile in the future to make decisions.”

At the same time, Microsoft announced in December last year that it will build a data center area in Chile. The company’s president Brad Smith said that the cloud computing ecosystem will generate 11.3 billion US dollars in additional revenue and 5.1 billion dollars for Chile in the next four years. Million job opportunities.

Chile is also actively participating in the construction of optical cable lines recently. In April last year, Google's 10,460-kilometer Curie optical cable connecting California and Chile settled in Valparaiso. The 12,875-kilometer Transoceanic fiber optic cable between Auckland and Sydney also connects Chile and Asia.

The 5G race in Chile currently has three operators competing against each other. Last month, mobile operator WOM won a government tender to build a 5G network. The predecessor of WOM was Nextel Chile, which was acquired by London private equity firm Novator Partners in 2015, which belongs to Thor Björgólfsson, the richest man in Iceland.

Novator also holds shares in a number of telecommunications companies in the Czech Republic, Finland, Poland and Greece. It acquired a majority stake in Colombian Avantel last year and is now renamed WOM Colombia.

Spain's Movistar and Chile's Entel also hope to participate in the construction of Chile's 5G network. WOM seems to be inclined to buy Huawei equipment, and the company is also the big winner of all four bandwidth auctions for Chile's 5G spectrum.

Regulatory requirements related to auctions mean that the network constructed by WOM will need to cover poorly connected areas such as Chilean highways, as well as remote areas such as Patagonia and Easter Island. (Little)

Source: NetEase Technology Report, translated by Google Translate