Mexico City.- Sharing telecommunications infrastructure is an alternative that can reduce the digital divide in Mexico and Latin America, in a context where the radio spectrum remains at high costs, specialists recommended.
“It is sharing infrastructure; both tower infrastructure that does not need a regulatory framework that changes much, as in other key situations,” said Aitor Ezcurra Unda, General Business Director of the Inter-American Development Bank Invest (IDB).
In a press conference, the representative of the organization accused that currently Latin America, including Mexico, has enormous inequality in monetary connectivity compared to regions such as Europe and the United States.
“The digital gap that we have in Latin America and the Caribbean from a monetary point of view to bring it to the levels of digitalization in Europe or the United States is 68 billion dollars,” he said.
He argued that infrastructure sharing should occur in the public-private sector; since this type of tasks can not only be handled by companies or telephone operators.
In this sense, Ezcurra Unda recognized that some governments in the region have achieved regulatory changes, such as the case of Peru, which allowed the implementation of a connectivity project in regions highly remote from social and economic centers.
Teresa Gomes de Almeida, CEO of Internet para Todos, a rural mobile infrastructure company created three years ago by Telefónica del Perú, Facebook, IDB Invest and CAF, said that the project today connects people who live in areas where connectivity was complicated. to perform.
According to the Global System Association for Mobile Communications (GSMA), to date more than 230 million people in Latin America do not have internet connectivity.
The above means that this population does not have access to the opportunities that the digital world offers in educational, work and cultural terms, mostly people who live in rural locations.
