Year after year, we remain committed to reducing regional asymmetries and ensuring that all Portuguese people, from the coast to the interior, have the same opportunity to interact with the digital world through our optical fiber network. We want to positively impact the population living in the areas we cover, establishing people and businesses and attracting investment.

To learn about the impact of our infrastructure on the municipality of Odemira, we spoke with Hélder Guerreiro, President of the City Council.

“This arrival of fiber to Odemira, which is a territory that, according to the country's logic, has many difficulties from the point of view of road and even rail accessibility, ends up being a way of facilitating access to the territory, guaranteeing much more competitiveness and ability to attract people.”

The municipality of Odemira was the one that, in the last 10 years, grew the most from a demographic point of view. According to the mayor, these results are directly related to the possibility of citizens having the possibility of working from Odemira to any part of the country or the world.

“During the pandemic, I was able to work from home for a company in Évora, and my daughter was able to take online classes, because we had fiber in our house”, he reveals.

All things considered, in the last 10 years, Odemira recorded a population growth of around 13%. For the executive, these results are due to a large migratory flow to the territory, which occurred because there was employment capacity, in turn related to the installation of dstelecom's optical fiber network in the municipality.

“All of this is possible because there is access capacity, the capacity to do business, through this new highway, which is, in fact, fiber”.

Schools in Odemira also began to take advantage of the Internet, by making training tools available online for citizens who do not have Portuguese as their mother tongue. Thus, through our infrastructure, this foreign population that has settled in Odemira can communicate with family and friends who are in their country of origin, but also with the Odemirenses they meet on a daily basis.

“Today, communications are dematerialized. More than concrete or tarmac highways, we are building a very important form of communication between everyone and with everyone, which is through fiber. Therefore, what we hope is that, in the coming years, Odemira will be more competitive, because it has greater capacity to reach the entire world”, concludes Hélder Guerreiro.

Watch the full testimony here.