The Superintendency of Telecommunications in Costa Rica is calling a tender to develop infrastructure for internet and mobile telephony services in 24 indigenous territories in the country.
The Sutel will receive technical and economic offers from telecommunications companies interested in developing the project up until May 31, and it will analyze the bids and award the project within a period of 45 working days.
The country's loss of competitiveness because of the deterioration of basic infrastructure development, is replicated in the case of the internet where average speeds are only 2.8 Mbps, far from the world average and below that of most countries in the region.
Costa Rica stands out in Central America for the quality and volume of goods and services related to technology which it produces and exports.
Panama is proposing installing on its territory a regional IXP to reduce the cost of data transmission between Central American countries.
An IXP is a piece of infrastructure which enables internet traffic to move between networks and through this interface to connect directly, without using an intermediate network. Among the advantages of an IXP are the higher availability of bandwidth and reducing costs in regional Internet traffic.
Between 2010 and 2014 internet access in households in the metropolitan urban area in the country increased from 18.3% to 27%.
In 2010, it was reported that in rural areas of Guatemala only 1.4% of households had internet access, a figure that hasn't changed to date. Nationally, 12.8% of the population has access to the internet.
The manager of the National Institute of Statistics, Ruben Narciso, told Estrategiaynegocios.net that "...
The Superintendency of Telecommunications in Costa Rica is putting out to tender the service to provide access to Fixed Voice and Broadband Internet Services in the south of the country.
SUTEL-BNCR Competition No. 010-2014
Contract to provide access to Fixed Voice and Broadband Internet Services to all communities in the districts of Biolley, Brunka, Buenos Aires, Chánguena, Colinas, Pilas, Potrero Grande and Volcan, in the canton of Buenos Aires, Puntarenas province and the provision of these services to Public Service Delivery Centers located in these communities, with support from the National Telecommunications Fund.
The National Telecommunications Fund plans to develop seven projects in the areas of education, social welfare, health and homes, which will feature, for the first time, internet and telephone services.
According to the Telecommunications Superintendency (Sutel), there are a total of 477 schools, 78 colleges, 155 Ebais (health centres), 25 Cecis and 70 CEN- CINAI which will be connected with a speed of 4 megabytes.