As part of a government initiative to connect 100 percent of Colombia for which it has already deployed a large number of Wi-Fi zones, SES has announced a deployment of 300 additional free community Wi-Fi zones in the country, enabled by high-speed broadband over satellite.
This comes, says satellite services and infrastructure provider SES, on the heels of the successful deployment of 1,000 free community Wi-Fi zones that connected more than 700,000 underserved Colombians nationwide in 2019.
Now local services provider INRED and SES Networks have completed the delivery of 300 additional broadband hotspots across rural areas. The additional sites were, say the partners, deployed in record time. They, like the earlier deployment, were part of Colombia’s Sustainable Universal Access project administered by the country’s Ministry of Telecommunications.
All 1,300 Wi-Fi zones in 424 municipalities across 20 departments are providing high-speed broadband services to nearly one million people and are enabled by SES Networks’ Signature Enterprise Solutions over the SES-14 satellite, which provides full coverage over Latin America, the Caribbean and the North Atlantic.
INRED and SES Networks have also been selected by the Colombian government to carry out a social connectivity initiative to benefit the people of the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina, two Caribbean island groups northwest of mainland Colombia, where satellite-enabled connectivity is now being delivered to 12 training schools and Colombian National Navy posts.