Gartner's Dataquest tallied access to basic telephone services and to more-advanced technologies, such as broadband Internet access, and found that those services continue to spread at a faster pace elsewhere.
Gartner said 80 percent of individuals in the US have a phone connection--a measure the company calls "teledensity." In Latin America, that figure ranges from just 7.9 percent in Peru to a regional high of 24.5 percent in Chile.
When it comes to broadband Internet access for consumers, such technology was not available at all in a number of Latin American countries surveyed last year, Gartner said.
In fact, it said that only four countries showed a significant penetration of consumer broadband access in 2000: Brazil, with 53,000 connections; Argentina, with 38,000 connection, Chile, with 22,000 connections, and Mexico, with 20,000 connections.
In the US, on the other hand, Gartner said, there were more than 6 million consumer broadband hookups to the Internet in place.
"Governments within Latin America need to put in place incentives for carriers to serve unserved and underserved areas as well as to upgrade existing networks," Ron Cowles, principal analyst for Gartner Dataquest's worldwide Telecommunications and Networking group, said in a prepared statement. "It is time to decouple regulatory services from local dial tone.
"We feel the appropriate measure is to frame the future as a competitive expanding information service economy, and then define public policy constructs to get there."
Said Cowles: "Incentives can and should be used to put in place new and more powerful networks, not only in areas attractive to competitors but also in underserved areas."
Marta Kindya, a senior industry analyst with Cowles' group, said the lack of broadband Internet access in Latin America "has created a sort of chicken or egg situation. Because there is a lack of advanced network infrastructure in most areas of Latin America, there is a lack of e-commerce--particularly for residence consumers."
The Gartner report, "What Will It Take To Bridge the Digital Divide in Latin America?" suggested that Latin American governments back the concept of universal access to communications services and then back that up with policies that don't play favorites with vendors and technologies.
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