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Venezuela Telecommunications
The national telephone company (Compañía Nacional de
Teléfonos de Venezuela--CANTV) was one of the most
notoriously
inefficient of government enterprises. According to some
estimates, CANTV satisfied only 60 percent of national
telephone
demand in the late 1980s. An estimated 1.8 million
telephone
lines served 1.4 million subscribers in 1988, and a
backlog of at
least 1 million persons awaited a telephone line. As a
consequence, several utilities, oil companies, and the
military
maintained their own private telephone networks. To get
telephones installed, wealthier consumers placed ads in
papers,
bribed telephone crews, or paid exorbitant rates for
cellular
telephones. CANTV's inefficiency stemmed from poor
management,
deficient maintenance, low quality of service, and
pervasive
political patronage. As late as 1988, only 40 percent of
Caracas
residents enjoyed direct-dialing capabilities. The
Ministry of
Transport and Communications' plan to alleviate the
country's
telephone crisis called for a US$1.6 billion expansion
program
from 1989 to 1992, with the goal of providing 1 million
new
direct-dial telephones in that period. The expansion
program also
sought to upgrade the country's dialing exchanges and data
transmission facilities, and to foster the use of
fiber-optic
technology. It also pursued new satellite facilities
through a
joint venture with COMSAT (Communication Satellite
Corporation),
an American company, to be managed by the Andean Satellite
Corporation (CONDOR) by 1994. Other planned reforms called
for
CANTV to revise its rate structure and to loosen its
monopoly by
creating several competing companies. Full and eventual
privatization was also a possibility.
A subsidiary of CANTV, the Postal and Telegraph
Institute
(Instituto Postal Telegráfico--Ipostel), provided mail and
telegraph services. Both services were generally very slow
and
unreliable despite the existence of 800 telegraph stations
nationwide. As a result, the use of motorcycle mail
carriers was
common. CANTV also administered 17,500 telex lines for
more than
13,000 subscribers, over half of whom were in the
metropolitan
Caracas area.
Data as of December 1990
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