Claro Argentina aims to cover all homes with fiber optics

Claro Argentina has set itself the goal of reaching every home in the country with fiber optic networks, that is 10-12mn households.

"Today we have a network that reaches more than 12mn Argentines with 3.19mn homes passed and 1mn fiber optic customers," Alejandro Quiroga López, director of regulatory and institutional affairs at Claro Argentina, told reporters in response to a BNamericas question.

Quiroga López declined to give details about the deadlines to reach national coverage, merely saying the objective is to do it "in the shortest time possible."

“We build a huge number of kilometers a year. We hope in 2023 to repeat what we did in 2022,” he told BNamericas.

The official added that Claro is working on several sharing projects with operators that deploy fiber to offer it wholesale.

"One of the changes we saw is that many municipalities and provinces that had restrictions to deploy infrastructure changed their regulations," he said. The clearest example, according to Quiroga López, is Mendoza, which enabled power poles for the deployment of fiber optics.

He also mentioned the cases of some towns in the provinces of Entre Ríos and Córdoba.

5G

Claro confirmed that it already has the core network for 5G ready. "The core is ready and tested to be able to adopt 5G at any time, we just need the spectrum," Quiroga López said.

Argentina plans to launch a spectrum auction next year, although the terms are still unknown.

Although Quiroga López stresses that Argentina must make the leap to 5G, he said there is still an opportunity to continue growing with 4G.

According to Lucas Gallitto, GSMA director for Latin America, there are 200MHz of spectrum to be made available to operators. This is excess spectrum in the 700MHz, 900MHz, AWS, 1900MHz and, fundamentally, the 2.5GHz bands, where there are still 100MHz available.