Paraguay’s Copaco launches IPTV, 3.5G and mobile TV

Juan Pablo Conti ©RapidTVNews | 13-12-2011

The Paraguayan Communications Company (Copaco) will launch its anticipated IPTV service on Thursday, as the state-owned firm's mobile phone subsidiary, Vox, simultaneously launches a powerful wireless broadband offering.
Mario Esquivel, head of Copaco, said the launch date was chosen to coincide with the concert that Mexican rock band Maná will perform in the national capital, Asunción, on the 15th.
The IPTV service, the country's first, will include 70 standard-definition (SD) and 10 HD channels. It will initially be available in those cities where the company already offers an ADSL broadband service.
Meanwhile, the wireless broadband service will be based on an upgraded cellular network using the HSPA+ (3.5G) radio interface. The service, which required an investment of around US$45 million, will include a number of packages whose only limitation will be the amount of downloaded data. Throughput will not be throttled, so it could reach as much as 16 Mbit/s in all cases.
The company is positioning this as a comparative advantage with competing operators, whose wireless broadband packages tend to cap both connection speeds (with maximum limits usually placed at between 2 and 8 Mbit/s) and capacity.
"Vox's users will be able to surf as fast as the radio link between their device and the base station allows it at any given location in any given time. The data transfer speed that a single user will be able to get in a best-case scenario will be 16 Mbit/s," Esquivel explained while speaking to Radio Ñandutí.
He also revealed that a selection of Copaco's new IPTV content (including all terrestrial and a few pay-TV channels) will be available free of charge to Vox's subscribers, who will be able to watch them live on their smartphones.