Abstract
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.
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