Communications in Latin America

one of the more remarkable advances in communications has taken place over the past twenty years in the countries of the developing world... it used to be a joke about how long it would take to get a land-line telephone installed in mexico, for instance, even if you were among the fortunate few who could afford one.... then came the cell phone and, voilà, suddenly everybody had a cell phone, from the traveling salesman to the high-school teenager to the lowliest street vendor... land-lines were suddenly passé... the eternal wait for a phone to be installed was history...

The statistics seem to reflect encouraging progress: the number of telephones per 100 inhabitants rose from 23.12 to 52.7 in South America between 1999 and 2004, while Central America experienced a leap from 17.24 to 47.9, more than tripling the population's access to telephone service.

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Of the 193 million telephone subscribers in South America in 2004, 62.6 percent were mobile phone users. While the number of fixed-line telephone connections grew by eight percent annually over the last five years, cellphone use expanded by 32.6 percent. The figures for Central America are similar: 10.3 percent and 38.8 percent, respectively.

most of the service, however, is pre-paid...

Practically all of the mobile phones in some of the region's countries are used on a prepaid basis. This was the case for 99 percent of cellphones in Suriname last year, 93.5 percent in Mexico, 93.3 percent in Venezuela and 80.5 percent in Brazil, as compared with six percent in the United States.

then, there's internet connectivity...

While the number of Internet users has rapidly expanded, it had still reached only 12 per 100 inhabitants throughout Latin America and the Caribbean last year, which is five times less than in the United States and Canada.

the above figures on internet usage are hugely misleading, however... in two places with which i am quite familiar, buenos aires and acapulco, there are internet cafes (cibers in the local vernacular), often two to a block, which are, more often than not, packed during evening and weekend hours... some cater to the younger crowd, offering networked computer games in addition to chat and basic internet access... some are more sedate and, consequently, charge a bit more per hour... virtually every young person over the age of 12 displays a surprising level of computer literacy, brandishes computer game skills to rival any american kid's, and sports an msn messenger address and contact list of similar age youth from all over latin america numbering in the dozens... if the user-per-inhabitant figure was revised to include this internet user community, it would present quite a different picture...

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