Uruguay’s national telecoms operator the Administracion Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Antel) is hoping to increase the number of households connected to its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network to 500,000 by the end of this year, its president, Carolina Cosse, was quoted by El Pais as saying.

Antel currently has around 288,000 customers connected to its fiber-optic infrastructure, which passes about 740,000 homes in the country. Last year the state-owned company said it was going to put $1.11 billion into its operations by 2017, around $727 million of which will go for its access network, including an expansion of its FTTH infrastructure. Cosse also said that their 4G LTE network, which came out in December 2011, covers 80 percent of the capital, Montevideo, and 99 percent of Punta del Este.