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The story
In 1990, Argentina started to privatize most of its state-owned utilities: power, water, trains, and telecommunications, just to name a few. The monopoly of state-owned phone service ENTel was split into two territories: Stet International (the previous name of Telecom Italia and France Télécom was given the "upper half" of the country, from the middle to the north, and Telefónica was given the southern part). Each company was given an initial 7 year monopoly beginning on November 8, 1990. Initially, other companies were given exclusive licenses for international long distance, as well as cellular phone service. Telecom Italia and France Télécom later sold its part of the company to the Argentine Werthein Group.
Its Puerto Madero headquarters were designed by the American architectural studio of Kohn Pedersen Fox, and inaugurated on February 18, 1998.
Both local phone companies turned their systems into profitable operations in just a few years, despite the terrible conditions they inherited from ENTel. In the worst years of ENTel, a line activation would take several years. The telephone wiring layout across the country was undocumented. At privatization in 1990, the wait was still four years to get new service and forty days for repair.
Starting off Telecom Argentina invested into the country and during the first 8 years of strong investment in infrastructure deployment at a rate a little less than a billion u$s per year, with a complete restructuring of the copper access network and the deployment of one of the most advanced and large deployment of SDH long-distance fiber network at those times 2.5 Gbit/s networks, and the upgrade of almost all central offices, most of them electromechanical and also some manual small exchanges.
Some years later, all of the phone network was upgraded to a state-of-the-art system, from central telephone exchanges up to the wires going into homes; by 2005, 98% of the ENTel network infrastructure had been replaced.
In 2005, the Bank of New York was appointed as trustee, registrar and paying and transfer agent for Telecom Argentina's $1.5 billion debt restructuring, the biggest Argentine debt restructuring to date. The restructure involved the exchange of $2.8 billion in outstanding debt for newly issued exchange notes and cash, and involved consent requests and instructions for over 1100 creditors.
On October 19, 2008, following difficulties, the company announced it was suspending the repayment of its debt, which at the time exceeded 3.3 billion dollars.
In 2017, Telecom merged with Clarín Group's Cablevisión so the new company became the largest mass media enterprise of Argentina. The merger was approved by the Government of Argentina in June 2018. After that operation, the group entered into the internet access and mobile telephony business.
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The Arnet brand, operated by Telecom, was rebranded as Fibertel Lite in March 2019.
From Wikipedia’s article on Telecom Argentina, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.8