COMMUNICATIONS: Mercosur Surfs The Internet In Increasing Numbers

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Daniel Gatti

MONTEVIDEO, Aug 11 1997 (IPS) - Testing the popular adage that the World Wide Web is a plaything for rich people in rich countries, the four Mercosur nations are home to nearly half the permanent Internet host connections in Latin America.

“The internet is still a phenomenon of the rich countries, especially the rich in the rich countries, and above all, the rich in the richest country, the United States,” concedes U.S. computer systems specialist Ronald Hamilton.

But he notes that the internet was “tending to democratise” and build a presence in the “not so poor nations”. That means, among others, the four Mercosur Southern Cone nations; Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, which lay claim to 56 percent of the internet hosts in the Americas outside the United States and Canada.

The quartet has seen a growth of 352 percent in new connections to the internet between January 1996 and the same month of this year, according to figures provided by the Network Wizards company in San Jose, Costa Rica.

This figure, of course, pales against the scale of growth in the United States, which gives a home to 93 percent of all the internet hosts in both continents. Canada accounts for five percent and the Mercosur nations, 0.84 percent.

The reason behind Mercosur states’ relatively strong growth in the internet sector is not due to any deliberate effort by the four nations, but rather to a “world scale phenomenon which has affected many countries in the region,” according to a report on the issue by the Uruguayan daily El Observador.

“Brazil, as in so many other areas, appears to be the great dynamo” of the sub-regional bloc on this issue, said the study.

Figures from Network Wizards say this nation has some 77,100 hosts, compared with 12,688 in Argentina, 1,823 in Uruguay and 187 in Paraguay.

Uruguay is the Mercosur member with the highest proportion of connections per head of population, having an index of 0.56 per 1,000 people, compared with 0.47 in Brazil, 0.36 in Argentina and 0.034 in Paraguay. Between 50,000 and 70,000 of Uruguay’s 3.1 million people use the system.

In Brazil, 120 times the population size of Uruguay, there are an estimated 800,000 users and in Argentina, 11 times the population, between 150,000 and 200,000. Paraguay, which only connected to the network in 1996, has only around 3,000 users so far.

Chile is one of the countries with most developed Internet usage in the Americas. There are around 16,000 hosts there, putting it fourth in the hemisphere behind the United States with 10.1 million, Canada, 603,000 and Mexico with 29,500 users.

But on the score of number of users per head of population, Chile is on a par with Uruguay, having around 200,000 people permanently connected to the network among a population of around 14 million people.

The expansion of the network in the 12 months from January 1996: 383 percent in Brazil, 291 percent in Uruguay and 238 percent in Argentina; has led the governments of the three countries to authorise different forms of access to Internet and to seek mechanisms for better connections.

In Brazil, there are currently around 600 private companies providing access to the system, in Argentina there are 90, while Uruguay has the state company Antel and five private concerns.

The authorities are also looking into improving the speed and quality of communications, as number of users puts pressure on the exiting links’ ability to handle traffic.

In Argentina, with the support of the three main national cable TV channels, access to the Internet will increasingly be provided via the cable network, which has a greater data transmission capacity than the conventional telephone system.

And in Uruguay, Antel is promoting a system known as UruguayNet, which could be operative from the end of the month, allowing access to Internet nationwide with greater facility and quality of connection.