According to recent studies, at least 9.3% of the country’s homes are not attractive for the fiber optic network deployments of traditional telecommunications companies.
This percentage today does not have and it will be very difficult that in the near future it can have an internet connection, since the investment required for that group is very difficult to finance, constituting the real real digital divide, the most difficult to eradicate.
To eradicate the digital divide, it is not enough just to solve the economic barrier to acquire a device with Internet connection capacity; but investment is required in access networks where the high cost of traditional solutions threatens the immediacy of the need, but forgetting that there are other technologies that can solve quickly and economically, the spearhead that allows solving the problem immediately and delivering quality connectivity, until there are the necessary resources to arrive with fixed networks.
Due to a commercial issue, investments in technology and connectivity are concentrated in urban poles where there is greater population density, so when evaluating the projects, the needs of rural areas are postponed due to their low population density, a permanent and more evident history since the birth of mobile networks and smart devices.
One technology that allows to reduce the digital divide is the satellite and in particular those services that use the Ka band, a band that has existed commercially for more than 13 years, widely deployed in the United States and Europe, but that product of the absence of public policies to promote and favor local innovative companies, added to the lack of technical experience to evaluate projects of this type of projects and generate agreements with private operators for their massification, they hinder their deployment, losing the best opportunity to immediately resolve the so-called digital divide.
As long as there is a digital divide, the educational gap will also continue to increase, isolation and accentuate social differences and inequalities. From the point of view of cost, Chile spends around $ 700,000 per month to keep an inmate incarcerated, with only one month the cost of equipment and the installation of one of these solutions is paid and with two months, the 1-year service can be paid, in the case of rural schools, we should ask ourselves how much it can cost and take to arrive with fiber optics to a school in the pre-mountain range?, can we wait to bring connectivity to the education system of a child?, and thus extrapolate to micro-enterprises, SMEs and households of the rural world.
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The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
