World Dialogue on Regulation

The report, Las Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación en los Hogares (Information and communication technologies in households), is based on recent data, gathered between August and October 2006. It is only available in Spanish.

A few interesting points:

• Mobile access in rural areas has almost tripled over the past year, but remains low - fewer than 6% of rural households have access, compared with almost 60% in Lima;
• Access to fixed line telephony in rural Peru has decreased over the past year from 0.3% to 0.2% of households. Internet access from rural households is practically nil at 0.14%, compared with 16% in Lima;
• In Lima households with access to broadcast radio actually declined in the past year from 65% to 58%. Television is by far the most available ICT in Lima, reaching 95% of all households;
• In rural communities, television is available only in 34% of households but radio is present in 73% - 15% more than in Lima;
• 29% of households in Lima have computers, compared to 0.7% of rural households.

The most novel thing about the survey is that it also looked at use of cabinas públicas (public internet access points, including telecentres and cybercafés). In the introduction to this section the authors of the study emphasise the important role played by the Red Científica Peruana, a non-profit multistakeholder initiative that pioneered the concept of cabinas públicas in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America in the 1990s.

• 42% of Peruvian households have at least one member who accesses the internet from a public access point;
• The number of households with at least one member who accesses the internet from a public access point has almost doubled in Lima over the past year, from 30% to 59%. It has also almost doubled in rural areas - from 7% to 13%. About twice as many households have at leastone member who accesses the internet from a public access point than have access to a mobile phone.

The survey also looks at individual (not household) use of public access points by gender and age. Among the findings:

• 37% of Peruvians between 12 and 18 years old use public internet access points, making them the age group that most uses them. 41% of women in this age group use them, but only 34% of men.

Overall the study concludes that while there is an increase in access to ICTs among all sectors, the data shows that the divide between the privileged and non-privileged sectors remains unchanged.

"For households and individuals, the results show that although the use of internet in public access points is increasing in all the subgroups considered: youth versus older people, people with more education and those with less, urban and rural populations, the difference tends to remain stable over time in terms of percentages, with the position of those sectors with more access being consolidated." (our translation)

Peru's digital divides continue to mirror its social divides, remaining very wide and in many cases getting wider. The main exception is mobile telephony, which is expanding at a faster rate in rural areas than in Lima, albeit from a much lower base point. The survey also reminds us not to ignore the importance of other means of communication, such as broadcast radio, for rural and marginalised communities. Policy makers seeing a decline in the importance of radio in Lima households should not be tempted to forget radio, by far the most significant information and communication technology available to rural communities. Likewise, despite the general failure of donor-funded telecentres, we should not underestimate the importance of public internet access points as a way of securing access to the internet.

You can download the report from the column on the right or from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática's website.