Claudio Feijoo González

Service Universalisation in Latin America: Network Evolution and Strategies

During the last two decades Latin American countries liberalised and, most of them, privatised their telecommunications industry. The reform aimed at increasing and maintaining public telephone networks while introducing a real and sustainable competition. All in all, the analysis reveals that, although teledensity rates have increased, the results are worse than expected. At the same time, and since the start of this decade, governments are more aware of the fact that the access of the whole population to telecommunication services is essential for the economic development of their countries and for the reduction of poverty. Thus, twenty years after the beginning of this process, an analysis of representative Latin American countries policies and their performance on the fixed telephone network evolution allows to provide some guidelines for the design of policies oriented towards the achievement of not just the traditional approach of universal service, but a new service and access universalisation.