Throughout 2017, Latin America saw a 6.1% year-on-year increase in fixed broadband deployments, reaching a regional total of 72.4 million connections.
The growth rate is only slightly lower than that achieved during 2016, which hit 6.3%.
DSL is still the most used internet technology in the region, with a market share of 48.1%. However, it is rapidly losing ground to both cable modems, which now account for around 38.6% of connections, and particularly optical fibre which saw year-on-year growth of 3.5% to take a market share of 13.3%.
Across households, penetration rates reached 41.5% in 2017, a year-on-year rise of 1.5%, although there are significant disparities in the rate between the region’s major markets. Chile, Mexico and Argentina have a penetration rate exceeding 50% whereas Colombia’s is around the regional average. Meanwhile, Brazil is almost 6 percentage points below the regional average but has the highest growth rate.
