Narayan AmmachchiEcuador’s state-run telecom carrier National Telecommunications Corporation (CNT) is building two data centers in an attempt to help the country keep pace with the growing demand for cloud services.
The data centers are under construction in the capital city of Quito and Guayaquil. “More than 50 percent of construction has been completed,” stated CNT in a press release, adding that it had set aside $36 million for the project.
The Quito data center should be operational in August, while the facility in Guayaquil is set to be ready in September. Once the data centers are up and running, CNT may launch several value-added services such as cloud computing, web hosting and unified communications.
“The data centers will benefit the government, corporate clients and the general public,” CNT added. Each data center will have about 180 racks. and reports indicate that CNT may also offer services such as virtual storage, applications and content management.
Data centers are in high demand in Ecuador. In 2012, Telconet constructed Latin America’s first Tier IV data center in Guayaquil.
The data center market in Latin America is expected to reach a compound annual growth rate of more than 10% with cloud services being the main driver of growth. However,the increasing investment cost due to high real estate prices is hindering growth in some countries.
Telecommunications is the fastest growing sector in Ecuador, with the number of broadband and fiber connections increasing to 9.5 million in March 2013. Ecuador’s telecommunications ministry Mintel has unveiled plans to set up 302 IT community centers, known locally as Infocentros, in 2014, to provide its citizens with wider and easier access to the Internet and online technology.
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