Retevisión

Second Retevisión logo, used from 1998 until 2003.

Retevisión was a former Spanish telecommunications company; of which a portion of it still exists as Cellnex Telecom, which was spun off from Abertis in 2015.

History[]

Retevisión was founded in 1989 as a public company, a division of the national public broadcaster Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE). Its original mission was to provide transmission facilities for television and radio signals throughout Spain.

In 1996, the Aznar government of the People's Party decided to liberalise the Spanish telecommunications market, and a license was granted to Retevisión.

In 1997, it was decided to move the company headquarters from Madrid to Barcelona. That same year Retevisión was acquired by Telecom Italia and the Spanish electricity utilities Endesa and Union Fenosa.

The company was operating without its own landline network, and users of Telefónica that were Retevision subscribers needed to prepend the prefix 050, which was later replaced by 1050, to the number in order to dial to route calls to Retevision.

At first, customers could only call other provinces with Retevisión. With the liberalisation of the local loop in September 1998, Retevisión customers could make local calls.

That same year, Retevisión bought the pioneers of the Internet in Spain, and and launched their own internet service provider (ISP) under the brand .

In June 1998 the company obtained a license for mobile telephony, and began operations in 1999 under the brand name Amena through its subsidiary .

Throughout 1999 it also launched data services over IP for enterprises (VPN networking sites), and direct voice and data by radio link, although the latter services had little success.

In Summer 2000, iddeo launched the ADSL service for businesses.

In the South Basque Country, Euskaltel retained its exclusivity versus Retevision therefore fixed telephony and the transmission of radio and television was performed by Euskaltel.

The brand Retevision as a telephony operator was abandoned in 2002 in favor of the new name Auna, a merger between Retevision and the cable operator AunaCable (both companies being part of Grupo Auna).

Retevision, as transmitters of signals from radio and television, was sold by Grupo Auna to Abertis, which spun off that particular business into a new company called Cellnex Telecom in 2014. In 2005, the cable television, fixed telephony and ISP portions of Auna were absorbed by the operator ONO. In 2006 France Télécom acquired the mobile telephony operations of Amena, which led to the creation of Orange España on 1 August that year.

References[]

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