Final Report:

Internet Topology and Connectivity in the Americas

by Eric Arnum earnum@interport.net

Technical Conference for the Implementation of IABIN

Brasília, 15-18 April, 1999

The Internet is soaring in popularity in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, growing from a historically small base into a new mass medium in just the past five years.  An examination of the Web, email and Internet access markets in all the countries south of Mexico reveals a very rich and diverse amount of Web content and Internet access options in virtually any city with phone service.

There are literally thousands of  Web and email services in Spanish and Portuguese available to the Internet user.  Virtually every major city has one or several Internet Service Providers (ISPs), although the cost of calls remains a problem.  Every country south of Mexico has numerous Internet hosts and Web pages.  But getting to all that content remains a major challenge.

The average cost of an ISP connection in Latin America is around US$36 per month for an unlimited amount of connect time, based upon a study conducted for this report of 215 ISPs in 18 countries.  However, phone calls to those ISPs, no matter how local, remains a costly proposition, because Internet users tend to stay on for many minutes per session.  Internet calls are much longer than regular phone calls, and unfortunately the per-minute fees of phone companies are charged for both.  This is a major problem with a simple solution: cease charging per minute rates for long phone calls.

The high cost of timed local phone calls combined with the difficulty obtaining PCs, modems, and extra phone lines has kept the size of the Internet population small in these regions.  The Internet infrastructure in South and Central America is generally young, but there is an encouraging amount of related infrastructures such as TV broadcasting, telephony, electricity, and mobile communications.  The problem is that the price of Internet communications keeps it a luxury for the fortunate.

While the demand for Internet services remains dampened by its comparatively high cost in Latin America, the supply of Internet-based computer services is soaring.  In 1998, the number of Internet hosts in the Latin American domains soared 95%, almost double the 48% rate seen in 1997, according to statistics gathered by Network Wizards, a California company that conducts a census every January and July. http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/top.html

In the year leading up to the January 1999 census, the number of Internet hosts in Latin America virtually doubled, to 491,000, and the number of Web pages published nearly tripled to 2.7 million.  In both these instances, growth in Latin America was much faster than the worldwide average (88% and 70%, respectively).  So 1998 was a record year for Internet growth in Latin America.

The largest Internet markets in Latin America are by far Brasil and Mexico.  The growth in the number of Internet hosts and the Web page population is documented in the following Powerpoint slides.

Similar slides are available for each of the other Latin American markets, as well as for select North American countries and domains.

Numerically, there are now 491,355 Internet hosts in the Caribbean, Central, and South American regions.  For the purposes of this study, Mexico is included but the USA and Canada are not.  The national two-letter domains of 48 countries are included, but the three-letter COM, NET and ORG domains are not included.  To varying degrees, all of the small Caribbean countries and territories are included, but the investigation of the smallest 14 was not pursued as deeply as for the other 34.

A summary of the size of the Internet infrastructure in these 48 countries as of January 1999 is included in the following table.

TABLE 2.1

INTERNET HOSTS AND WEB PAGES

PUBLISHED IN LATIN AMERICA,

INSTALLED BASE IN JANUARY 1999