The goal is to reduce the digital gap
More than 350 public and private actors from the telecommunications sector of the region attended the CRT2014 to debate about the challenges faced by Latin America to increase connectivity among users
The 2014 second Regional Telecommunications Congress (CRT2014), which recently took place in Panama, became a gathering place for governments, regulators, enterprises, the academia, and international organizations, on the subject of digital development public policies in Latin America.
This meeting, promoted for the second year by the Asociacion Iberoamericana de Centros de Investigacion y Empresas de Telecomunicaciones (AHCIET) (Ibero-American Association of Mobile Operators GSMA Latin America), CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, with the collaboration of the Union Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT),(International Telecommunications Union), the Registro de Direcciones de Internet para America Latina y el Caribe (LACNIC) (Registry of Internet Addresses for Latin America and the Caribbean) Internet Society (Isoc) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The host of the meeting was once again the Government of Panama, represented by the Autoridad Nacional de los Servicios Públicos de Panama (ASEP) (National Authority of Panama's Public Services).
The different panels of the Conference agreed that the priority is to reduce the digital gap that exists in the region. In this respect, Pablo Bello, Secretary General of the AHCIET, highlighted the need to strenghten public policies and establish a working agenda that promotes public-private dialogue to address the main goal in the region: people who are not connected to wide band.
Bello stated that "We have lived a technological revolution without precendent, with wireless network penetration rates that exceed 100 percent, where one out of three homes in the region is connected to wide band, and the prices of telecommunications services have dropped significantly by 25 percent since 2010. The connection speeds have more than doubled in the past four years to reach, on average, 3 Mbps".
However, he stated that despite the significant advances in past years, half of the Latin American population does not use Internet. He concluded that "A good job has been done, but we must double our efforts to end the digital gap".
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