Last week, Venezuela’s National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) reportedly ordered blocking of internet access service provided by Colombian operators offering their service in Táchira. Likewise, the vast majority of private companies that offer the service in this border state have presented continuous failures since the blocking of the social network X began.
Carolina Morales, a resident of a housing development in the upper part of San Cristóbal, said that she has been paying for the Colombian internet service for more than a year, but last week for three consecutive days she had no access to internet and despite the repeated requests she made to the company for information on the causes that originated the failure in the service, she had not had a response until this Sunday when she was informed that the company would not continue operating in this Andean state, apparently by orders issued by Conatel.
“When they told me that the Colombian internet was no longer going to work, I ran desperately to look for other companies, because I have all my children, my grandchildren and my sisters abroad and I only communicate with them through video calls. Being left without internet means disconnecting completely from my family, that is why I installed the Colombian internet provider, because it had no blocks and never went down, even if there was no electricity my internet always worked. Now installing another one is very expensive,” said Morales.
The situation was repeated with other operators, which have only provided internet service intermittently during the last week. So far they have only notified their users that the failures are “at the level of the main provider,” without offering more details.
Likewise, when these providers restored the service, they have informed users of the following: “It is worth mentioning that temporarily our network will be allied with another company, however, the attention from the sales, collections and Technical Support departments will continue to be the same numbers. Last but not least, taking into account the failure that occurred since Wednesday at 21:00 GMT, a 20% discount will be applied to your next bill (equivalent to six (6) days).”