Chile finished 2007 with a record fiscal surplus of just under US$14.5 billion, government officials acknowledged Wednesday. This figure represents 8.7 percent of Chile’s overall GDP, which is also an all-time record.
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A study by the Chilean Association of Banks (Abif) showed that communications, construction and finance are set to lead Chilean economy’s growth in 2008.
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The Chilean government and the country’s private internet, telephone and subscription television providers signed an agreement on Wednesday in which they pledged to make joint efforts to close Chile’s “digital gap.” The Public-Private Agreement for Digital Connectivity in Chile aims to substantially increase telecommunications access in rural and low-income communities before Chile’s 2010 bicentennial celebration.
“We believe that telecommunications play a fundamental and strategic role in achieving the economic, social and cultural development of our country,” Undersecretary of Telecommunications Pablo Bello said. “That’s why we consider it fundamental to deepen the expansion of the networks.”
Among the agreement’s concrete goals are providing internet access to 100 percent of rural schools and telecommunications services to 95 percent of the rural population. Another aim is to increase Chile’s total number of internet connections from approximately 1.3 million to 2 million by 2010. It is hoped that many of these connections will be in the homes of the poorest tenth of Chileans, who currently possess only four percent of the country’s internet connections.
The Undersecretary of Telecommunications’ office told The Santiago Times that telecommunications deficiencies are most severe in rural areas, where many communities lack telephone, internet and television services entirely. Traditionally, telecommunications providers have been hesitant to invest in such areas because of the perceived lack of profitability.
The government seeks to change this by offering subsidies to private companies that agree to bring their services to outlying zones or underserviced communities. In Wednesday’s agreement, the government pledged to provide 40 billion Chilean pesos (approximately US$80 million) for this purpose. Telecommunications companies, in turn, will apply to receive the subsidies and carry out the projects specified by the government. It is estimated that these private companies’ investments in the undertakings will double the amount of the subsidies.
The agreement seeks to make internet connections faster as well as more numerous. While recognizing that Chile is a leader in Latin America when it comes to connection speed, Bello said the country lags far behind European and many Asian nations.
He stated that the government also aims to guarantee so-called “web neutrality” by preventing internet service providers from making certain online content and applications more difficult for users to access than others. The Chilean Senate’s Transportation and Telecommunications Commission is currently reviewing a bill which the Undersecretary of Telecommunications’ office said seeks to “guarantee that users, whichever internet provider they have, have free access to Web content.”
An official from the Undersecretary’s office explained that this “free access” is not always available to Chilean internet users, citing a 2006 case in which broadband and fixed-line telephone provider Telefónica was found to have blocked internet telephony providers (ST, Oct. 31, 2006).
Ideally, according to Bello, future consumers will have access to a “more transparent, deeper” telecommunications market that offers them more options and access to information.
AI
