Brasil Telecom (BrT), the incumbent local exchange carrier for the Center-West and South, launched a digital subscriber line multimedia service on Tuesday, October 14. Marketed under the brand name Turbo Vídeo, the service provides two-way voice, data and video via an ADSL line, enabling the customer to use a PC or TV monitor to receive video signals. BrT plans to announce the names of companies certified to supply modems and decoders at Futurecom, which takes place at Florianópolis later this month. A 1 Mbps connection is recommended but for subscribers with lower speeds BrT?s server will create a faster connection during transmissions and return to the lower speed thereafter. Negotiations on video content are under way with a pay-TV company and a broadcaster. BrT plans to partner mainly with pay-TV operators that haven?t yet built networks or don?t want to upgrade existing networks for video-on-demand and pay-per-view, which Turbo Vídeo will highlight. BrT will start testing the service soon and begin delivering it commercially in January. It plans to have 200,000 ADSL subscribers by the end of 2002, half a million by the end of 2003, and 1m by the end of 2004. It aims to offer Turbo Vídeo in 104 cities in a year?s time. At some point in the first quarter of next year, every single municipality in the state of Paraná will have broadband access lines.
Competition
