In 1994, Bresnan formed a joint venture with Chilean conglomerate Cristalerias de Chile S.A. Through the venture, Cordillera Comunicaciones, Ltda., the company rapidly built an extensive broadband network in Santiago and other cities. Within two years, Cordillera became the largest cable operator in Chile.

When Cordillera was created, it consisted of 61,000 subscribers in Santiago and four other markets. The partners agreed on an aggressive growth schedule, and within 15 months more than 5,000 kilometers of cable plant were built or upgraded to 750 MHz. By early 1996 the customer base had grown over 129%, to almost 140,000 subscribers in eight cities.

In February 1996, Bresnan and Cristalerias finalized an agreement with CTC, the Chilean company (owned by Telefonica de Espana) that operates virtually all of the country’s local telephone service, to consolidate Cordillera’s network with CTC’s cable television operations. At the time of the merger with CTC, Cordillera was the leading cable operator in Santiago. In 1998, Bresnan’s interest in Chile was sold to its partner, TCI International (now Liberty Media) as part of TCI’s efforts to consolidate its Latin American interests in the key areas of Chile and Argentina. At the time of the sale, the Chilean customer base topped 235,000.

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