Costa Rica Internet – Lagging behind on Advanced Internet.

A research done by the Advisory Commission of High Technology (Caatec), sponsored by Cisco and the National Council of Competitively, called Barometro Cisco de Banda Ancha, confirmed that Costa Rica is behind on High Speed Internet compared to other countries of Latin-America.

Only 46% of the accesses to the network are high speed connections. It represents about 65,600 accesses that only represent 1.5% of the population, when there are 4.3 million inhabitants in Costa Rica.

Other countries of the region have higher coverage, for example: Chile (5.6%), Argentina (2.7%), Brazil (2.6%) and Mexico (2.2%).

High Speed Internet allows a faster transmission of information and video. The study invites Internet providers and public and private companies to increase the quality and amount of accesses to high speed internet in the region.

During the presentation of the study Alfredo Volio, minister of Production, pointed out that High Speed Internet is very important due to its capacity to improve productivity and economic development for the country, as well as competitively.

The Barometro’s point is to update the number of connections in the country every six months.

Results. Ricardo Monge, Caatec’s director said that the speed of Advanced Internet is very slow. Cateec’s research showed that high speed internet offers 24 hour availability and speed connections of over 128 kilobites per second.

According to this, DSL connections had an increase of 76% and high speed connections a 35% since 2005 up to the first six months of this year.

Volio and Monge indicated that we could close the year with 80,000 connections. The investigation reveals that only 5% of Costa Rican homes and 15% of small and medium companies use High Speed Internet.

For Volio it’s very important to open the telecommunication market and lower prices. His goal is to have 325,000 connections for the year 2010. But the government suggests creating 60,000 new connections every year from now on.

They want to increase the current figure of 1.5% coverage to 7% in 2010, very close to Chile’s goal for this year of 8.5% coverage.

Our thanks to Juan Fernando Lara S. and our friends at La Nación – Costa Rica’s largest Spanish circulation newspaper for their permission use this article.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.