Communications in Argentina
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Argentina by topic |
|---|
|
Communications |
This article is about the various communications systems of Argentina.
Contents |
[edit] Telephone
The Argentine telephone system is more modern following privatization in the 1990s and, more recently, market deregulation; a sizable minority of households, however, do not have fixed-line telephones. The privatization brought a new numbering plan. The growth of the mobile telephone market since the beginning of the economic recovery has been impressive, with new customers now preferring a comparatively cheap cellular phone to fixed-line household service.
- Fixed lines (in use): 9 million
- Mobile (cellular phones): 46 million
- Public phones: 156,000 (data as of December 2008)[1]
The domestic telephone trunk network is served by microwave radio relay and a domestic satellite system with 40 earth stations. It carries a monthly traffic of about 1.3 billion local calls, 300 million inter-city calls and about 20 million outgoing international calls.[1]
International communications employ satellite earth stations - 3 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean); two international gateways near Buenos Aires; Atlantis II submarine cable (1999). This system is largely replaced with a domestic fiber optic ring connecting the main cities (actually the main central offices). This link runs at 2.5 Gbit/s. From these head central offices, local calls are routed through 10 Gbit/s fiber optic links, or 3 × 155 Mbit/s microwave links. These links are spaced at about 30 km. Some of these links (the ones serving smaller towns) are spaced at 60 km and this makes communications unreliable in certain weather conditions.
According to a report released in January 2006 by INDEC, mobile phone lines increased by 68.8% during 2005. Eleven million mobile phones were sold that year and, by then, these serviced three-quarters of the population over 14. A growing minority of users are children under 14, something that has raised concern and debate in Argentine society.[2][3] A private study conducted by Investigaciones Económicas Sectoriales (IES), covering January–October 2006, found a 51.2% growth compared to the same period of 2005. In December 2007, the number of these units (40 million) exceeded Argentina's total population. Most of the phones (almost 90%) are imported from Brazil or Mexico. [4] The monthly volume of calls made with these units (over 3.8 billion) more than doubles the number made on fixed lines; a further 5 billion text messages are sent, monthly.[1]
[edit] Companies
In the 1990s the Argentine telephone system (which was formerly property of a state-owned company, ENTEL) was sold to two private corporations looking to invest in the local market: Telefónica, a telco from Spain, and Telecom Argentina, owned by Telecom Italia and the Argentine Werthein Family. The country was divided in two zones, within which one of the companies was the exclusive provider of the service (a state-sanctioned monopoly).
The service was then deregulated in several steps, first allowing the participation of other companies to provide international phone call services, then mobile services and finally the domestic service.
Telecom has a subsidiary Internet service provider, Arnet. Other ISPs, such as Flash (property of the Clarín group), hire the facilities of Telecom and Telefónica.
Several newcomer companies in the telephone market (2005) offer high-speed broadband access, Voice over IP and other services to a restricted market group (businesses and high-level residential users).
[edit] Radio
- Radio broadcast stations:[5]
- AM: 260 (including 10 inactive stations)
- FM: 1,150
- Shortwave: 6 stations (1998)
- Radio sets: 24.3 million (1997)
Radio broadcasting enjoys a long and varied history in Argentina, tracing its origins to a 1910 stay in the southside Buenos Aires suburb of Bernal by Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph. There, he achieved a rudimentary radio transmission with a kite-mounted antenna connected to earphones. Argentine publisher José C. Paz later sponsored Marconi's radio transmission from Italy to Buenos Aires, the first transatlantic broadcast into South America.[6]
Three local medical students, led by Enrique Susini, began their own radio experiments in 1917 and, installing transmission equipment in Buenos Aires' Coliseo Theatre, they broadcast, on August 27, 1920, Parsifal, the first opera on radio and only the second radio broadcast in the World. These installations became LOR Radio Argentina, the World's first formal radio station. The number of receivers in the city at the time: around 20. This station was joined in 1922 by LOX, whose ad for the Los Andes Restaurant is probably the World's first on radio. Several more stations opened in Buenos Aires during Argentina's prosperous 1920s and growing numbers of artists signed contracts for their live radio performances. The medium's boom and the lucrative local ad market allowed Susini to sell his station in 1930 to U.S. telecom giant ITT for US$200 million, a record at the time. The visionary entrepreneur invested a part of the funds into Lumiton Film Studios, among the first to produce sound movies in the World.[6][7]
Argentine radio embraced tango in the early 1930s and LR1-Mundo (referred to as LR1 for its being the first on the dial) became the standard for tango broadcasts, though after 1940, Jaime Yankelevich's Radio Belgrano began to overshadow competitors with a novel format: late-night broadcasting; by then, Buenos Aires was home to 25 stations (as many as in New York, a city, at the time, almost three times larger). A musician scheduled to perform live on Radio Mitre at the time failed to appear, leading emcee Manuel Rodríguez Luque to broadcast a record, instead (one of the first such broadcasts in the World).[6] Radio Mitre became the first in Argentina to broadcast around the clock, in 1960.[8]
The public sector became increasingly involved in Argentine radio during the 1950s, nationalizing a number of stations (including Belgrano) and inaugurating others, such as the Argentine Foreign Broadcasting Service. The station, in 1958, became only the third in the Western Hemisphere (after the Voice of America and Radio Canada International) to broadcast internationally and in several languages. The Radio Broadcasting Law of 1980, which led to the privatization of 44 stations, touched off an era of state disinvolvement in Argentine radio, however, and helped lead to corporate consolidation over the airwaves. Many of these hitherto public radio stations (known by their acronym, LRA) had helped extend the medium into Argentina's then-remote far north and Patagonia. Since then, Argentine radio, which at the time was dominated by AM broadcasting (only 22 FM stations were in service)[6] has, as elsewhere, been broadcast mostly over FM airwaves. ArInfo (Buenos Aires) became the first Argentine station to broadcast online in 2001 and, today, 61 stations do so, nationwide.[9]
[edit] Television
Argentine television broadcasting began in 1951 with the inaugural of state-owned Channel 13 (since privatized). A technology jealously guarded by U.S. broadcasters at the time, this was largely the achievement of Russian-Argentine engineer and radio pioneer Jaime Yankelevich. Color television broadcasting, however, was not widely available until after 1978, when the government launched Argentina Televisora Color (ATC), now Channel 7 (Argentina's principal public television station). The prevalence of cable television, increasing steadily since the first CATV transmitter opened in the city of Junín in 1965, is now the third-widest in the world, reaching at least 78% of households.[10]
- Television broadcast stations: 42 (plus 444 repeaters) (1997)
- Television sets: 10.5 million (2000)[11]
[edit] Internet
The number of Internet users in the country has been estimated at 16 million (2007),[12] the number of registered domain names was approx. 1.7 million in August 2008[13] and the number of internet hosts in 2007, 2,159,000.[14]
Besides monthly-paid Internet connections (either flat rate or with a number of free minutes), in Argentina there are also a number of Internet service providers that have commercial agreements with the telephone companies for charging a slightly higher communication rate to the user for that communication, though without any monthly fixed fee. Among the roughly 7 million PCs registered in Argentina in March 2008,[15] the number of residential and business computers connected to Internet totaled about 3.3 million, of which about 92% were broadboand connections.[16]
The number of dial-up users decreased has drastically since 2005, in favor of broadband Internet access; whereas, at the end of 2005, there were 794,614 broadband connections (as well as 508,608 dial-up connections), by December 2007 2,557,413 broadband connections were registered, 93% of which were residential and 81% of which connected at a speed of least 512 kbit/s.[17][18] Among residential users, 47.1% were located in the city of Buenos Aires, 26.4% in Buenos Aires Province (including Gran Buenos Aires), 7.1% in Santa Fe Province and 6.4% in Córdoba.[19]
Among companies and organizations, 272,725 connection contracts were valid as of March 2008, 99% of which broadband.[16] Among the total (in late 2005), 39.0% correspond to the city of Buenos Aires, 37.7% to the Buenos Aires Province, 4.7% to Santa Fe Province, 3.3% to Córdoba Province and 6.2% to Patagonia.
The number of e-mail accounts in June 2008 was calculated around 5.15 million, with a monthly traffic of 1.59 billion messages (only partial information available).[20]
Argentina's Internet top-level domain is .ar.
[edit] Broadband Internet access
ADSL first appeared in Argentina in 1998, named Speedy by Telefónica, a Spanish company. Fibertel, a cable provider, now offers Cablemodem service in a limited range of cities, and ADSL is monopolized by the 2 major phone companies:
- Telecom (in the north with Arnet ADSL)
- Telefónica (in the south with Speedy ADSL)
In 2004, Arnet announced new plans. Controversy ensued, as in small print it mentioned that it was capped to 4 GB monthly. This plans were never put in practice until late 2005, though they were modified from the original announcements. There are no longer any capped plans. They currently offer from 640/128 kbit/s download/upload to 5 Mbit/s / 256 kbit/s (the second highest download rate offered in the country after Fibertel's Fiber6M 6 Mbit/s / 256 kbit/s) for home users. The uncapped 5 Mbit/s plan costs 148 AP (Argentine Pesos), about US$ 48 at the current exchange rate, whereas the 2.5 Mbit/s /256 kbit/s plan costs 109 AP or US$ 35. Arnet has been slowly recovering its reputation, which was tarnished amongst connoisseurs due to their 2004 announcement. See: Arnet prices
Both Speedy and Flash have a declining[citation needed] user base, many opting to go the way of Fibertel[citation needed]. Their services are often mentioned to limit P2P download activity[citation needed](fibertel no, cómprenos!). The best connection both ISPs offer is 6 Mbit/s / 512 kbit/s.
The tendency has been towards lowering costs to the public, instead of making investments to offer higher speeds.
[edit] Saturation and Overselling
The minimum theorical ADSL speed is 1 Mbit/s for download, 128 kbit/s for upload; but due to severe overselling started in 2007 and cheap prices, this speed is rarely effective, being disconnections and great latencies a constant on both companies. International connectivity has the worst part, multiplayer gaming is nearly impossible due to latencies beyond 500 and 1000 ms. There are no plans to solve the congestions and the CNC (National Communications Commission) has proven largely ineffective in regulating these services.
[edit] Post
The format of a postal address in Argentina is as follows:
- Person's name
- Company name (if applicable)
- Street address
- Postal code City
(optionally) Province
For example:
- Marcelo A. Muñoz
- Telefónica de Argentina
- Defensa 390, Piso 5
- C1089DEP Capital Federal
There are no standard abbreviations for provinces' names; but the province name is optional and usually not needed if the postal code is correct. The format of the postal code was expanded in 1998 to include more specific information on location within cities; it now uses a letter that identifies the province, a four-digit number, and then three more letters (and slightly different numbers are used for different parts of a city, which was formerly done only in the case of Buenos Aires). See Argentine postal code for details.
The largest mail carrier nationally is the public Correo Argentino, followed by two private carriers operating nationwide (OCA and Andreani) and a number of regional ones.[5]
[edit] References
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the CIA World Factbook.
- ^ a b c INDEC
- ^ [1]
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ a b Mi Buenos Aires Querido
- ^ a b c d Argentine Radio: Over 60 years on the air. The Argentine Information Secretariat, 1981.
- ^ Clarín: historia de la radio en la Argentina
- ^ Clarín: Radio Mitre cumple 75 años
- ^ notiinforma.com
- ^ Liceus: Formatos repudiados y exitosos de la televisión
- ^ Encyclopedia Britannica. Book of the Year 2005. Statistical appendix: Argentina.
- ^ Internet stats: Argentina
- ^ Infobae
- ^ CIA Factbook
- ^ Clarín
- ^ a b Taringa
- ^ Emprendedores
- ^ Infobae
- ^ INDEC
- ^ Diario Uno
|
||||||||||||||
