Broadband overview: Latin America

Latin America is still a developing broadband region with approximately half the population penetration compared with the World average. Being one of the richest countries in the region, Chile is the most developed broadband country, but even so it only had a broadband penetration of 6% of the population as of December 2006, which is comparable to Greece, the least developed Western European country by some margin.

The biggest issues (as in other developing regions/countries) for greater broadband take-up are affordability of broadband services and of course the PC equipment required to use them. For the main countries highlighted in this report, GNI per capita is less than $10,000 in all four cases, lower than countries in other ‘developing’ regions such as Czech Republic and Hungary, and over four times lower than the US. The average wage in Brazil is just over $500 per month in urban areas, and according to the World Bank, 8% of the population earn less than $1 per day. Across all four countries, on average, 60% of the national income is earned by the top 20% of the population. In our opinion, if either the economic situation doesn’t rapidly improve, or if hardware and broadband services are not further subsidised, broadband saturation in the consumer market could happen as low as 40% of households. This would create huge broadband divides at both a regional and country level. The Brazilian Government recently announced fresh initiatives around making both PCs and broadband services more affordable to a greater proportion of the country, and such initiatives, assuming done properly, should be applauded.

Competition in the region is largely limited to incumbent operators versus cable TV companies. However, other than in Chile, the competition has largely focused on wealthier metropolitan areas, leaving little to no competition for large sections of the population. To their credit, incumbent operators have deployed broadband networks in large proportions of their regions, but it is obvious from developed markets that the most successful broadband countries are those with healthy competitive markets. Regulators should therefore try to encourage greater competition in the DSL markets, which will become the dominating broadband technology throughout the region.


Report Highlights

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Figure 1 Broadband penetration at a regional level (December 2006)
Figure 2 Broadband penetration at a country level (December 2006)
Figure 3 Gross National Income (GNI) per capita
Figure 4 Percentage share of income or consumption
Figure 5 Take up of broadband versus income in Argentina
Figure 6 Take up of Internet versus income in Brazil
Figure 7 Annual dial-up and broadband costs
Figure 8 Dial-up and broadband costs as a percentage of GNI per capita
Figure 9 Consumer broadband penetration in Latin America
Figure 10 Subscribers by technology in Latin America
Figure 11 Top-level broadband figures for Argentina (000s)
Figure 12 Broadband player statistics (000s)
Figure 13 Top-level broadband figures for Brazil (000s)
Figure 14 broadband player statistics (000s)
Figure 15 Top-level broadband figures for Chile (000s)
Figure 16 Broadband player statistics (000s)
Figure 17 Top-level broadband figures for Mexico (000s)
Figure 18 DSL player statistics (000s)
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