Retevisión

Retevisión is a Spanish telecommunications company and a subsidiary of Abertis.

History

Retevision was born in 1989 as a public company, a division of the national public Radiotelevisión Española. Its original mission was to provide transportation for the television and radio signals throughout Spain.

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

In 1997 it was decided to move the company headquarters from Madrid to Barcelona. That same year Retevision was acquired by Telecom Italia and the Spanish electricity utilities Endesa and Union Fenosa. The commercial launch occurred in January 1998.

The company was operating without a 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.